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JULY 1891 


MAYFAIR SERIES 


^Subscrifittop Price 




/o 4™THQR'£F. 

L ' the: ^ 

i^RACKOFDOOl 


i^evv^.ybw , ^ 

EDWARD BRANDUS CO 

PUBLISHERS, 30 BROAD STREET. 

JNTEReO AT.TWS-«?5T omCE.NCW Y0RK,A8 seCOMD CLASS MATTER 






















MAYFAIR SERIES 




BY THE AUTHOR OF 


OF DOOM 






EDWARD BRANDUS & CO, 

NEW YORK. 






A GRASS WIDOW 




CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER. PAGE. 

I. A Medical Confidence, ... 7 

II. Startling News, 20 

III. Hue and Cry, 31 

IV. Dr. X.’s Strange Patient, ... 38 

V. Was it a Signal ? . . . . .50 

VI. A Message from the Sea, ... 68 

VII. Some Clever Manoeuvring, ... 81 

VIII. A Midnight Visitor, .... 91 

IX. A Compromising Situation, . . . 103 

X. “Look There! What’s That?" . 119 

XI. Pursuer and Pursued, .... 137 

XII. Was She Good OR Bad? . . .151 

XIII. 'Mid the Fury of the Storm, . . 173 


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GRASS WIDOW, 


CHAPTER I. 

A MEDICAL CONFIDENCE. 

I FIRST heard of Mrs. Laura Ingers from a 
fashionable city doctor. He did not, of course, 
outrage the obligations of professional secrecy 
by disclosing her name to me, but he excited 
my interest in a patient whom he did not name, 
and unwittingly said enough to enable me to 
discover to whom he referred. It came about 
in this way. 

After a University career of no particular dis- 
tinction, I had made a desperate effort, and, with 
the aid of a skilful coach, succeeded in win- 
ning a humble place in the Civil Service. Now 
it so happened that Doctor X. (I will disguise 
his identity under this letters) was a native of 
the parish of which my uncle was minister ; and 
when I went up to London to begin my duties 

7 


8 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


in the Education Office, my uncle conceived it 
to be for my advantage to send me furnished with 
an introduction to the great physician, and to 
bespeak his kind offices for me. A more cour- 
teous or kind-hearted man than Doctor X. does 
not live ; he sent for me very soon after my 
arrival, gave me heaps of good advice, and at 
parting made me a very sensible and serviceable, 
if somewhat singular, present. He had a great 
respect for my uncle, he said, and he had care- 
fully considered how he could show that he was 
really desirous of befriending and helping the 
nephew of so good a man, and as a result of this 
consideration he had come to the conclusion that 
a very useful present for a young man, and one 
likely to keep him out of harm’s way in his even- 
ings, would be an annual subscription to a great 
lending library. Accordingly he handed a read- 
er’s ticket to me at parting. 

Ten months passed, and I had begun to think 
that my busy patron had forgotten all about me, 
when quite unexpectedly I received an invitation 
to breakfast with him one Sunday morning to- 
wards the end of July. Doctor X. was far too 
tenacious a man to drop anything or anybody he 
had once taken in hand. It has often surprised 
me to find that the busiest men seem to have the 
most leisure for friendly little attentions. 

The busy physician had not forgotten me, nor 
had he forgotten his thoughtful present of a sub- 


A MEDICAL CONFIDENCE. 


9 


scription to the circulating library. One of his 
first questions was whether I had found it useful. 

Now, it was not without some misgiving and a 
certain sense of shame that I essayed an answer 
to this question. For the truth was, that it was 
not for the more solid kinds of literature that I 
had taken advantage of my privilege. My reader 
must remember that when I went up to London 
I had just passed through the nerve-shattering 
grind of preparing for a competitive examination. 
I had consequently felt the need of a little relax- 
ation, and had shrunk with something like a phys- 
ical incapacity from the strain of heavy reading. 
When therefore, my benefactor asked whether I 
had found his present useful, I assured him that 
I had found it very useful ; but I could not help 
reddening as I remembered that the numerous 
books I had taken out were not of the kind ordi- 
narily called by that adjective. 

Doctor X., however, was not to be put off with 
a general answer. He was really interested in my 
welfare, and he proceeded to question me more 
particularly, with the result that the whole truth 
came out. It was not so dreadful after all, for it 
appeared that he was himself a great reader of 
novels, especially of sensational novels. I was 
much relieved to find this, and we compared 
notes for a good quarter of an hour over our 
favorite stories, the laborious professional man 
astonishing me by showing as minute and ex- 


10 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


haustive an acquaintance with recent fiction as 
myself. 

Time passed very pleasantly this way, but all of 
a sudden an idea struck him that was not so ex- 
hilarating for me. He would have it that it was 
not merely for amusement that I had read so many 
volumes ; he suspected, or he affected to suspect, 
that I had a purpose in my reading. So purpose- 
ful a man could hardly understand anybody’s 
wasting a great deal of time in a particular line of 
reading without a purpose. His own purpose in 
reading novels was relaxation, but he had earned 
his right to it, and I was young and my profes- 
sional labors were not heavy. Possibly it was 
simply inconceivable to him that I read only for 
amusement ; and if it was conceivable, it would 
probably have seemed to him highly injudicious 
at my. time of life. At any rate he suspected, or 
affected to suspect, that my object in reading so 
much fiction was to study the art and qualify my- 
self for the practice of it. 

Now, nothing was further from my thoughts. 
The bare idea was horrible to me. I had roused 
myself to make a furious cram for the competition, 
but once in I had no intention of doing any more 
work than the public service required of me. My 
father had left me a little money, though not 
enough to live upon. I was obliged to choose 
some bread-winning occupation, and it was be- 
cause I believed the Civil Service to be an easy 


A MEDICAL CONFIDENCE. 


II 


life that I had made such an effort to get into it. 
The work of the office was quite enough for my 
appetite ; I could have been content with less. 

But it was in vain that I protested. My good 
friend, full of energy himself, would have it that I 
was possessed of literary ambition. I confessed 
to having written verses, though not for publica- 
tion, but as regarded anything further assured 
him that he was mistaken. Still he professed not 
to be convinced, perhaps thinking this a good way 
to kindle a wholesome spirit in an idolent young 
man ; and throwing himself back in his chair, he 
gave me his own ideas on the subject of novel- 
writing. The successful physician was eminently 
a man of practical talent. 

“ Passion and incident, d’ye see ? — passion and 
incident, that’s what you want — what we want, I 
should rather say, d’ye see? Something out of 
the common. Characters, too, of course. If I 
take up a novel I don’t want to be bored with the 
ins and the outs of humdrum people. It may be 
very good psychology and all that, d’ye see? very 
good psychology and very clever and all that, but 
it’s not what we want, d’ye see? not what we 
want.” 

I entirely agreed with him, and said so; and 
he continued, still holding himself well back in 
his chair, grasping an arm in each hand, and look- 
ing me directly and energetically in the face : — 

“ Passion and incident — I don’t pretend to know 


12 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


much about it, but it strikes me that that is what 
you ought to look out for, d’ye see? if you mean 
to write novels and mean them to be read. If you 
have plenty of passion you may get along with 
comparatively little incident, and if you have 
plenty of incident you may get along with com- 
paratively little passion. But it is better to have a 
good deal of both, d’ye see, particularly incident, 
unless the passion happens to be” — He paused 
an instant for a word and added, tremendous, 
d’ye see?” 

All this was said in an offhand way, but with 
great vigor of manner. When the great doctor’s 
mind was unbent, he did not take much trouble 
about his words, as long as they came near his 
meaning; and it was his habit, in familiar ex- 
planation, to keep alongside of his hearer’s under- 
standing by frequent repetition of the formula 
“d’ye see?” He grappled on by it, so to speak; 
it answered the same purpose as holding on by a 
button, all the better that every time he used it 
he gave a straight and vivid look into his hearer’s 
eyes, compelling attention. But it would not be 
fair, in reporting what he said, to write down this 
expletive as often as he used it ; the words alone, 
without the keen, frank look that accompanied 
them, would give no idea of their peculiar effect. 

His earnestness, which would probably have 
been equally great on any other topic, made me 
smile, and I repeated that I entirely agreed with 


A MEDICAL CONFIDENCE. 


13 


him. “ But/’ I added, “ if you mean that I should 
try to write fiction, I am none the better for 
knowing this, for I have not a spark of imagina- 
tion or invention in me.” 

“ Um,” he said, that’s a pity.” He pondered 
for a second or two ; but having once decided that 
I must have a turn for writing, he would not let 
me off. “ But it’s not invention that does it, d’ye 
see? You’ve only got to look out, look round 
you, d’ye see ? Much stranger things happen 
than ever were invented. We doctors, for exam- 
ple, could supply you with heaps of stranger 
things — if we were not under the seal of secrecy, 
d’ye see ? professional confidence — heaps of 
stranger things than any fellow could invent. 
Nature’s much wider, d’ye see ? than a man’s 
brain — more room for queer combinations.” 

I politely said that I quite believed it ; but 
something false in my tone must have struck him, 
for he proceeded energetically to strengthen his 
assertion. 

“ Yes, I believe I could keep half-a-dozen novel- 
ists going, with raw materials, d’ye see ? and some- 
times they would want very little dressing. Now, 
for example, a few weeks ago I had a very inter- 
esting patient. Yes, I often have interesting pa- 
tients, but this one was particularly so. A fine 
woman, a very fine woman, married to a man old 
enough to be her father, who is away from her 
pretty near all the time— a sort of ‘ grass widow,’ 


14 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


as they say, d’ye see ? Very bright and very lively 
disposition, and very fashionable, but badly bored 
from having nothing particular to do ; not having 
been bred to the life, d’ye see ? perhaps eating too 
much, and certainly drinking too much. I or- 
dered her down to the quiet of the country and the 
bracing air of the east coast, and put her on milk 
and that sort of thing, d’ye see? The air may do 
her good, but as for quiet — the woman couldn’t 
be quiet.” 

I gave an appreciative laugh, but could think of 
nothing better to say than “ Satan finds some mis- 
chief still for idle hands to do.” 

“ Eh, what ?” said the doctor. The extreme com- 
monplaceness of the remark evidently staggered 
him. Idle hands, yes. The woman couldn’t be 
quiet, d’ye see? She’s sure to make mischief wliere- 
ever she goes. Now, if I wanted to write a novel, 
and wanted to have a fresh plot, I should simply 
go down to the same neighborhood, d’ye see ? and 
watch what happened ; taking care to keep out of 
her way myself, of course,” added the doctor, with 
a hearty laugh ; “ of course taking care to keep 
out of her way myself.” 

‘‘And you would find both passion and inci- 
dent in her proceedings,” I echoed. 

“ Exactly,” said the doctor ; “ we doctors don’t 
believe in Fate, in one sense, d’ye see ? but it 
comes to the same thing. Given a certain consti- 
tution and certain fixed circumstances, the rest 


A MEDICAL CONFIDENCE. 


15 


follows as a matter of course. You can’t predict 
the exact thing, d’ye see ? but you can predict the 
kind of thing.” 

The doctor relapsed into silence, and an ab- 
stracted look took possession of his features. For- 
getting for the moment his professional position, 
and hardly thinking of what I was saying, I 
startled him by asking what was the lady’s name. 

“ Eh? Her name ?” he said, starting out of his 
reverie. 

‘ I beg your pardon,” I said. “ Of course I 
shouldn’t have asked that. I didn’t really mean 
it, I spoke without thinking.” 

“ No, of course I could not tell you her name,” 
he said, with a smile, and looked at his watch. 
** But you should think seriously of it — I mean of 
writing, and that sort of thing, d’ye see ?” 

I did think of it, but not perhaps so seriously 
as my friendly patron would have approved of. 
His offer of unlimited raw material for stories out 
of his rich experience struck me as comical. I 
had not the faintest intention of attempting any 
such manufacture. I knew I had no talent for it ; 
and even if I had supposed myself to be so gifted. 

I was not inclined to sacrifice my leisure for the 
sake of developing my talent. I had entered a 
public office with the intention of leading a quiet, 
leisurely existence, and I meant to do it. 

I was a little inclined, too, to be credulous about 
the marvels at which the doctor hinted as having 


i6 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


occurred within his professional experience ; and 
his idea of being able to diagnose a woman as cer- 
tain to produce strange events worth recording 
wherever she went, particularly tickled me. 

By-and-by, as I turned the amusing idea over in 
my mind, I found myself beginning to wonder 
whether after all it was possible. 

I was leaving for a month’s holiday at the end 
of the week. I began to think that it might have 
been good fun to have the opportunity of testing 
the doctor’s prediction, and to regret that as I 
did not know the name of the interesting patient, 
or where the doctor had ordered her to, this was 
out of my power. 

All through the day the idea haunted me, till 
at last my curiosity on the point became so keen 
that I actually began to consider whether I could 
trace the lady with such information as the doc- 
tor had given. It was still, however, more in a 
spirit of whimsical speculation than serious inten- 
tion that I reckoned up what I knew. 

It amounted to this, that she was a woman of 
fashion, and that she had been ordered to try the 
bracing air of the east coast. This was not very 
definite, seeing that there are many resorts for in- 
valids on the east coast of Britain. But as I re- 
flected it occurred to me that the clue might be 
more definite than I was at first inclined to sup- 
pose. There are many salubrious resorts on the 
east coast, but almost every physician has his pet 


A MEDICAL CONFIDENCE. 


17 


sanatorium, and I remembered that Doctor X. 
was known to have great faith in the restorative 
virtue of the air of his own native coast. 

Now that particular part of the east coast of 
Scotland is somewhat bare and bleak, entirely 
destitute of fashionable watering-places, and not 
at all richly provided with suitable accommodation 
for fashionable visitors. It occurred to me, then, 
that if I were to spend part of my holiday with 
my uncle at the Manse of Garvalt, as I already 
half thought of doing, I could easily discover 
whether any person answering to the doctor’s de- 
scription of his patient was settled anywhere in 
the neighborhood within twenty miles. It so hap- 
pened that in the parish itself lay the house of a 
somewhat embarrassed landowner which was oc- 
casionally let for the shooting season ; it was just 
possible that the lady was there, for Doctor X.’s 
recommendation had once before obtained a ten- 
ant for it. 

I wTote at once to my uncle, and asked whether 
Garacraig House was let for the season. 

An answer came by return of post. My uncle 
was a bit of a humorist in his solemn, old-fash- 
ioned way. He affected to believe that I was 
after the house for myself, and wrote that he was 
glad that I found the public service so profitable 
that I was in apposition to look out for a country 
house in which to recruit my exhausted energies. 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


l8 

Garacraig was unfortunately let to a Manchester 
man of the name of Ingers, whose lady had al- 
ready come into residence. But if the Manse was 
not beneath his nephew’s dignity, and he cared to 
spend a week or two there, an affectionate and 
respectful uncle would be most happy to see him. 

This looked rather promising. It was, of course, 
but a remote chance that Mrs. Ingers would prove 
to be the doctor’s patient, but it was enough to 
decide me to spend the first part of my holiday in 
Garvalt. 

She must be a very turbulent person indeed, it 
struck me, if she could contrive to make a com- 
motion of any kind in this staid and quiet parish 
— a person really worth observing. 

When, however, I had reached this stage, a new 
consideration made me hesitate. Was it quite the 
right thing to set myself deliberately in this way 
to spy upon the woman? If this was she, I had 
discovered her secret by accident, by unintentional 
slip on the part of her medical attendant. Was it 
altogether honorable, was it not rather mean, to 
take advantage of this ? 

I put this question to myself, but I am afraid I 
rather evaded it. I persuaded myself that I was 
only half serious in my intention of watching her, 
that it was only a lark, and that of course I would 
not really go as a spy or a detective. I should 
only be in the neighborhood if anything in her 


A MEDICAL CONFIDENCE. 


19 


conduct came to general knowledge. I could not 
conceive what scope for startling incident any 
lady, however passionate, could find in so tame 
and humdrum a parish as Garvalt. But this, so 
far from diminishing my curiosity, rather whetted 
it. 


20 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


CHAPTER II. 

STARTLING NEWS. 

The Manse of Garvalt is six miles from the 
nearest railway station. My cousin, Mary Brown, 
my uncle’s only child, drove the old phaeton to 
the station to meet me. 

I caught sight of her face as the train ran in — a 
bright, clear-complexioned face, scanning the car- 
riage windows with a frank smile of pleased ex- 
pectation. I had expected to see my old friend 
Andrew, the Minister’s man, in waiting for me, 
but I was not disappointed to see Mary instead. 

Now, Mary had very little to do with the curi- 
ous series of events that came under my observa- 
tion. I will keep to them as faithfully as I can, 
and although she was and is well worth describing 
I will not linger over the description of her. Let 
it be understood once for all that I was not in 
love with her — at least not very ardently — and 
that she — I can state this without any qualifica- 
tion — was not in love with me. 

I will not deny that I had made love to her in 
a mild way, and perhaps the pleasure of seeing 
her helped unconsciously to bring me to Garvalt 
at that particular time. She was two years 


STARTLING NEWS. 


21 


younger than I. I had been brought up from 
early boyhood in my uncle’s house with her, my 
father and mother having lived in India and 
having both died young ; and during my college 
vacations and her school holidays, as she grew 
into womanhood, I had written many verses to 
Mary and about her. To me saturated as I was 
with academic poetry, she was a type of Diana, of 
fair Cynthia, bright with heavenly radiance ; and 
even now, as I think of her large dark blue eyes, 
fringed with dark long lashes, and overarched by 
clearly pencilled eyebrows, her full lips and per- 
fect teeth, as perfect in shape as flawless in pearly 
whiteness, her tall, straight figure, and the firm 
poise of her head on finely moulded shoulders, it 
seems to me that an artist in search of a model 
for Diana might have gone farther than Mary 
Brown and fared worse. But alas ! she was as 
cold as Diana to all my boyish sighs and vows ; 
and whenever I was tempted to make love to her 
in earnest, she laughed at me and chaffed me till 
I was fain to abandon my serious vein. 

“ Dear me, Georgie,” was her greeting, “ what 
have you been doing to yourself since you went 
to London ? You have made yourself positively 
good-looking.” 

Positively good-looking !” I echoed, laughing. 

I am glad you have become appreciative at last.” 

But I need not recall the chaff that passed be- 
tween my light-hearted cousin and myself on this 


22 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


and other personal topics, We were very good 
friends if we were nothing more, and we laughed 
and chatted merrily enough as we rattled along 
behind the old white horse. 

Of course it was not long before I seized an 
opportunity of asking whether she had seen the 
new tenant of Garacraig. 

“ He has not made his appearance yet,” she 
said. He is not expected till it is time for the 
shooting.” 

“ But the lady?*^ 

“ Mrs. Ingers? Yes, she has come. But what 
do you know about her?” 

“ Oh, nothing,” I said, with perfect truthful 
ness ; for as yet it was only a wild guess on my 
part that Mrs. Ingers might be the doctor’s pa- 
tient. “ I never heard her name till your father 
mentioned it in his letter. Is she nice?” 

“Very,” said Mary; “ quite fascinating, particu- 
larly with men. My father is quite in love with 
her, and my mother likes her because she is al- 
ways so deferential to papa. She likes the com- 
pany of clever people, she says. Fancy anybody 
calling papa clever ! I wish she would call him 
so to his face. You know how he detests the 
word. But it is to mamma that she gushes about 
him, positively gushes about papa and his clever- 
ness. It’s a perfect picture to see the three of 
them together. I really had no idea he could be 
so fluent. She draws him out so, drinking in 


STARTLING NEWS. 


23 


every word as if he were an oracle, though all the 
time it must bore her to death to hear his theories 
about Free Trade, and Communism, and what 
not — you know them. And all the time my 
mother sits by, looking from the one to the 
other, as if it were the happiest and proudest 
moment in her life, and she had never before fully 
realized what a treasure of an old husband Provi- 
dence had given her. Dear old papa, he does 
enjoy himself ! We are to have her to tea this 
afternoon, and you will see. He is quite — what is 
the word ? — rejuvenated." 

I allowed Mary to rattle on, and softly drew 
my own conclusions. First, that if Mrs. Ingers 
was the doctor’s warranted mischief-maker, she 
would find little scope in my uncle’s household, 
because the more she admired my uncle, the more 
she would win the gratitude and affection of my 
aunt. Second, that there was just a touch of 
jealousy in Mary’s account of the fascinating 
stranger, and that this could not be due entirely 
to the lady’s hypocritical worship at the feet of 
the old philosopher. Her “ particularly with 
men ’’ gave me a clue. There must be another 
man in the case, and I shrewdly suspected that it 
was a young doctor in the neighborhood, Alec 
Errol, whose attentions to Mary in former days 
had given me my first experience of the green- 
eyed monster. 


24 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


So you don’t like Mrs. Ingers very much 
yourself, Mary?” I said. 

“ Oh yes,” she protested, “ we get on very well 
— exchange books and all that. But she has not 
much to say to me when she can get a man to 
talk to.” 

There was something very unlike Mary in this 
veiled detraction, and I was more convinced than 
before that there must be a reason for it. 

“ Has Alec Errol met her ?” I asked slyly. 

“ Oh yes.” 

“ He comes pretty often to the Manse, I sup- 
pose ?” 

Mary colored slightly, and gave the old horse a 
slight flick with the whip as she answered that 
her mother’s health was still very uncertain. 

“ Does Mrs. Ingers think him very clever also ?” 
I pursued. 

The color in her face deepened. “ She seems 
to think most men clever. She seems very gen- 
erous in her appreciation of men. I shouldn’t be 
surprised if she found something Attractive 
in you.'' 

This was a very vicious cut, and I laughed 
merrily ; while Mary said that really I did not 
deserve that she should have come all the way to 
the station for me, braving all the perils of the 
road. “You don’t know the risk I ran in coming 

O 

for you,” she declared. 

“ Is he so dreadfully jealous?” I asked. 


STARTLING NEWS. 25 

“ Don’t be so silly, George,” she answered, with 
every appearance of anger. 

“Well, what other risk can there be on the 
Skateness turnpike ? We are not in the Austra- 
lian bush. Oh, I see. It must be old Mors. 
He has turned vicious in his old age. I always 
thought the name was uncanny. Only a horse of 
the most respectable character coulj have carried 
it off so long without misadventure.” 

Mary assured me that it was not Mors, the 
name we had given to my uncle’s white horse 
when we had studied Latin together. 

“ What can it be, then ?” I asked. I saw that 
I was not likely to get any more information out 
of her about Mrs. Ingers, and that she was making 
a violent effort to get away from the subject, so 
I thought it best to humor her, and made various 
absurd guesses as to the perils of the road between 
the Manse and the station, which had the effect 
of restoring her to her ordinary mirthful serenity. 

At last she asked me if I had not seen a news- 
paper that morning. 

“ Yes,” I answered, “ I bought one as I came 
along, but I was only half awake, and I am not 
prepared to stand an examination upon it.” 

“ And you actually looked at the paper without 
seeing that our quiet neighborhood is this day 
the centre of interest for the whole country?” 

“Goodness gracious, Mary!” I cried. “What 
has happened ? Your manner is most alarming. 


26 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


Do you observe a deathly pallor stealing over my 
countenance? If there is not, please take it for 
granted. I am very pale within, if it does not 
show. Keep me, I pray you, no longer in sus- 
pense. Tell me the worst.” 

It passed through my mind that if Mary was 
not hoaxing me, which I grievously suspected, I 
might after all find some passion and incident in 
Garvalt even although Mrs. Ingers should not 
prove to be the lady I was in search of. 

“ Did you see nothing in the paper about an 
escaped convict ?” she asked. 

“ I believe I did see something of the kind, 
now you speak of it.” 

“ And did you not see where he had escaped 
from? You surely can’t have missed that ?” 

“Strange as it may appear,” I answered, “ I was 
guilty of that amount of stupidity. Bear with 
me. I was half asleep. It surely was not from 
the prison at Skateness, though by your smiling 
you seem to say so ?” 

“ It was. That convict is now at large, proba- 
bly in this very parish, and by this time half fam- 
ished and desperate. At this very moment he 
may be lurking behind that dyke,” she added, 
pointing with her whip to one of the loose stone 
walls which serve the purpose of fences in this 
part of the country. 

“ You don't mean to say so !” I cried, in affected 


STARTLING NEWS. 


27 

alarm. “ I wish I had bought a six-shooter before 
I started for these lawless wilds.” 

I assure you I was looked upon at the Manse 
as a very foolhardy person when I proposed to 
drive to the station for you. Mother could hardly 
be brought to hear of my going. She begged me 
almost with tears to stay at home.” 

I laughed with a thoughtless freedom that was 
rather offensive to the heroine. She detected in 
my laugh an entire absence of any sense of the 
danger of the situation, and charged me with it 
roundly. 

“ Well,” I admitted, “ I don’t quite see where 
the danger comes in.” 

“ Don’t you ? Of course not. Do you suppose 
that when a convict knocks down a warder and 
gets clear away he has his pockets full of money 
like an Education Office clerk on a holiday ?” 

“ I make no supposition on the subject,” I an- 
swered. “ It seems to me that it is for him to 
consider the ways and means before he seeks re- 
lief from official care, so to speak. A wise man 
always counts the cost, you know. That is a con- 
sideration for him, not for me.” 

‘‘Oh, no doubt he considered it,” said Mary 
confidently, ignoring my flippancy ; he had his 
ways and means all in his mind’s eye. But answer 
me this. Being outside with no money in his 
pocket, with his jail-cropped hair and his convict 
clothes and the broad arrow to mark him out, so 


28 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


that he couldn’t beg, he must get food somehow, 
and how was he to get it ? He must live somehow, 
yo\i know.” 

“ In the words of the philosopher,” I answered, 
“ I don’t see the necessity.” 

“ But he does,” sharply retorted my cousin ; 
“ and that’s why the whole parish of Garvalt is in 
such a state of consternation. I assure you that 
nobody stirred out of doors last night after dark.” 

“ Has it become the habit, then,” I asked, “ Of 
this strange population on ordinary occasions to 
wander about at night, instead of going peaceably 
to bed like the rest of Her Majesty’s subjects ? It 
is not very long dark here in the beginning of 
August, you know.” 

“ The worst of it is,” pursued Mary, “ that no- 
body knows who is to be attacked, and yet some- 
body is sure to be.” 

“ It would certainly be more courteous on the 
part of the escaped gentleman if he would send 
timely notice to whomsoever he means to honor 
with the duty of providing for his wants. But the 
age of chivalry is dead.” 

My father says,” continued Mary, “ taking a 
much less skittish view of the matter than a scof- 
fing would-be Cockney, that it reminds him of the 
story of Grendel in Beowulf, the horrible monster 
who comes stalking across the moors at night out 
of the mist and the darkness, and bursts open the 
doors in search of human prey.” 


STARTLING NEWS. 


29 


‘‘ Your father is a fine scholarly old gentleman, 
and has my respect,’' I said. “ But, as sure as my 
name is Virgil, I hope Grendel will come when I 
am at the Manse.” 

“ I hope so,” said Mary, with emphasis. 

“ I should like to make the acquaintance of an 
escaped convict.” 

“ Well, we shall see. Perhaps your wishes may 
be gratified sooner than you think, and you can 
tell me whether the reality comes up to your ex- 
pectations. But in the mean time produce your 
newspaper, and we can make ourselves acquainted 
with him as far as possible secondhand.” 

“ Distance lends enchantment to the view,” I 
quoted, as I lugged the newspaper out of a pocket 
in my ulster. “ But I thought you had seen it, 
from the exact knowledge you professed of the 
space occupied by the story. ” 

“ Oh, that was only a guess ! I knew, of course, 
that there would be a lot about it in the paper. 
You don’t mean to say that you are already so 
much of a Londoner as to have forgotten our 
country ways ? Our post does not come in till ten 
o’clock, and the doctor has the paper till five.” 

Mary stopped abruptly and colored just a little. 

‘‘The doctor again!” said I, enjoying, though 
perhaps with a grain of uneasiness, her confusion. 
“Well, v/ell, Mary, I know somebody who would 
not keep you waiting for the paper till five.” 

“ Gevil,” she retorted sharply, “ you have no 


30 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


idea how idiotic you look when you grin like that. 
Open your paper, and I will walk Mors, if you like, 
while you read. I am dying to know what they 
have found out about that convict. It was only 
yesterday he got off.” 

And Mors was reined in, nothing loath, while I 
read the newspaper report to my cousin. It has 
often been remarked that a very small and com- 
monplace thing in our own neighborhood interests 
us more keenly than the biggest and most won- 
derful occurrences at a distance. 


HUE AND CRY. 


31 


CHAPTER III. 

HUE AND CRY. 

WITH regard to this escaped convict, I will set 
down here some of the particulars that the repor- 
ters had discovered. It was the first case of an 
escape from the Harbor of Refuge Convict Works 
at Skateness, and naturally the local papers made 
a good deal of it. 

The fugitive’s name, it appeared, was Arthur 
Roper, alias Alexander Richards. He was not 
possessed of many aliases, from which it was to be 
inferred that he had not run a lengthened career 
as a criminal. Indeed, it was ascertained that, as 
far as was known to the police, he had committed 
only the crimes for which he had been put in 
durance, and it was mentioned as a singular fact 
that both crimes had been committed on the same 
person, and that person a relative of his own. The 
name of his victim was not given. 

Roper was a native of Manchester, and had been 
an engineer by profession, a fast young man, ad- 
dicted to sport and betting, and his first offence 
had been forgery. He had forged the name of a 
relative for quite considerable sums. For this of- 
fence he had been sentenced to a term of four years. 


32 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


and had served out the whole time, carrying away 
with him a rather bad character for violence. This 
character he had fulfilled by committing a violent 
robbery within two months of his release, giving 
the name of Richards when he was apprehended. 
It looked as if he had been contaminated by his 
prison life and incapacitated for honest employ- 
ment ; but there was this curious circumstance 
about the second crime, which had been com- 
mitted in Edinburgh at the time of the Exhibition, 
that his victim had been the very same relative 
whose name he had forged. It seemed thus as if 
the motive of the attack might have been revenge 
and not plunder ; only it was the fact that he had 
garrotted his victim skilfully and stripped him of 
watch and money before he was caught, and it 
looked rather like a deliberate professional opera- 
tion than a mere violent act on a sudden impulse. 
He had been sentenced, at any rate, to four years 
for this second crime, two of which he had served 
when he made his escape. His behavior had been 
better during this second term in prison. He had 
been bred originally an engineer, and he had taken 
in prison to the trade of a blacksmith, working at 
it with apparent contentment till the morning of 
his disappearance. 

The gist of the story of escape was that he had 
been employed in some blacksmith work on one of 
the wagons in the outside prison yard, had felled 
the warder with a blow on the head that rendered 


HUE AND CRY. 


33 


him insensible, seized his revolver, and bolted. The 
prison adjoined these, there being some works 
between it and the water : in this outside yard 
were manufactured concrete blocks used in the 
construction of the pier ; a gate through which 
rubbish trucks were run was found open. He 
could never have got off unobserved but for the 
fact that the morning was very foggy ; a dense 
mist covering coast and sea. The pursuit insti- 
tuted as soon as the senseless warder was dis- 
covered had thus been rendered fruitless. 

A trace of him had, however, been discovered 
during the day. A yacht was lying at anchor in 
the bay, some 300 yards from the prison, the 
Foatnhell, the property of an English gentleman 
named Wood, who was on board at the time. 
Mr, Wood had sent some of his men on shore in 
search of fresh provisions, and was leaning over 
the taffrail waiting for breakfast, and waxing 
rather impatient at the unexpected length of 
their absence, when he heard a gun fired — the 
signal that a prisoner had escaped. A few min- 
utes afterward a boat came suddenly out of the 
fog. Easy, easy ! ” he shouted, thinking it was 
his own men ; but the next instant he recognized 
the prison white jacket and toque of the solitary 
sculler. Warned by the shout, the man turned 
his head just in time, and sweeping round passed 
within a yard or two of the prow. He showed 
his gratitude by leaving behind him a shower of 


34 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


fierce oaths, desiring to be informed what the 
yachtsman meant by sticking up his blooming 
old yacht there, and not getting out of the way. 

Mr. Wood at once sent notice to the prison of 
what he had seen, and it was found that a boat 
was missing from the beach, a small coble with 
which the workmen of a neigboring quarry were 
in the habit of fishing after hours. Roper had 
gained the beach under cover of the fog, and 
made off with it. 

But in what direction had he gone ? Skate- 
ness, a small fishing town, was forty miles from 
any large town with a low-quarter of professional 
criminals among whom he might find sympa- 
thizers and shelterers. For miles upon miles 
inland stretched a closely cultivated district bare 
of trees, where a man in convict dress could not 
long elude observation and would have difficulty 
in finding any temporary hiding-place. Along 
coast to the south for five or six miles was a 
stretch of precipitous rocks, deeply indented 
with creeks and hollowed out into caves ; beyond 
that, two miles or so of hummocky sands ; then 
rocks again. On the coast line to the north came 
first a deep bay, lined with the fishing town of 
Skateness, the bay that was being enclosed by a 
breakwater to form a harbor of refuge ; beyond 
that, some miles of level sands ; beyond that 
again more rocky seaworn cliffs. If the fugitive 
knew the country, he would naturally make for 


HUE AND CRY. 35 

the cliffs either to north or south : nowhere else 
had he any chance of temporary concealment. 

But which had been his direction, south or 
north ? This was a question of some interest to 
us in Garvalt, for we lay to the south, and as I 
read from the newspaper to my cousin, she 
quickened her attention at the statement that 
search-parties had been sent out in both direc- 
tions. Had they found any clue to his movements? 

They had ; and it pointed northward. 

A peculiar method of curing fish is in use on 
that coast. Haddocks and whitings are cleaned 
and salted, and spread out to bleach and dry in 
the sun ; near the fishing villages you will see the 
rocks covered with them, and the fences fes- 
tooned with them for hundreds of yards. 

A little girl was engaged in this industry on 
the rocky point of the bay on the opposite side 
from the convict establishment, spreading out the 
fish from a heap under an old pilot jacket where 
they had been collected to protect them from the 
rain of the previous afternoon, when a man rowed 
up and asked her some questions about the coast 
to the north. When she had answered his ques- 
tions, not a little confused and frightened by his 
looks, he asked her for some fish ; and when she 
refused and scampered off, he landed and carried 
off some handfuls of fish as well as the old pilot- 
jacket, threatening to come back and do for her 
if she told any body that she had seen him. 


36 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


From tin's the police concluded — so at least 
the reporters said — that Roper had gone north- 
wards, and was lurking either among the sand 
dunes or among the rocks on the coast beyond 
them. But they had not found his hiding-place, 
nor had they recovered the stolen boat. Mary 
and I had a little argument on the point. I con- 
tended that his question to the girl was a blind ; 
that he bound her over to secrecy, knowing that 
that was the surest way of making her tell ; and 
that he spoke of the north, meaning to make for 
the south, and was now almost to a dead cer- 
tainty, lurking somewhere in the neighborhood of 
Garvalt. Mary, however, refused to be intimi- 
dated, and argued on the other hand, first, that 
the police were much more likely to be right than 
I was; and second, a more reasonable though 
not a perfectly consisted argument, that in the 
fog the convict must have rowed more or less at 
random, and that nobody knew any more than 
himself in what direction he had fled. 

A description of the fugitive was appended in 
leaded type : — “ A powerfully built man 5 feet, 
iij inches in height ; age, 33 ; complexion, dark ; 
dark gipsy eyes, in fleshy sockets; wide mouth 
with protruding under lip and strong square 
chin.” A typical villain’s build, which for easy 
recognition hardly needed the special marks that 
were also advertised, namely, “ two teeth on the 
left side of the upper jaw turned in, and a knot 


HUE AND CRY. 


37 


on the back of the left hand." The minute in- 
dustry of the reporters had gleaned the fact that 
these bodily injuries had been incurred by Mr. 
Roper, when he was a sportive young man at 
Manchester, the turned-in teeth being the result 
of a blow from a cricket-ball, the broken meta- 
carpal bone of a kick at football. He had been a 
leading exponent of both sports. 


38 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


CHAPTER IV. 

DR. X.’S STRANGE PATIENT. 

C I SAW Mrs. Ingers for the first time that after- 
noon at the Manse, and I confess that at first 
I was somewhat disappointed. I was possessed 
with the idea that she must be the patient of 
whom Doctor X. had spoken. I had no good 
reason for fastening upon the tenant of Gara- 
craig as this identical lady, but somehow I clung 
to the belief as a matter of intuitive faith, and 
had formed in my mind unconsciously an image 
corresponding to what I had heard of her powers 
of stirring passion and causing strange incident 
wherever she went. I had expected to see some- 
thing much more dazzling and commanding, re- 
served and suggestive of mysterious depths, than 
the frank and graceful lady who entered the room. 

I am ashamed to say that I cannot recall how 
she was dressed, except that she wore a straw 
hat with a low crown and a wide straight brim, 
and a well-fitting jacket of the same material 
as her gown, a dun-colored tweed. Now that 
I think of it, the wide brim of her hat must have 
been tilted a little from behind, for I remember 


DR. X.’S STRANGE PATIENT. 39 

that it almost hid her eyes when she bowed to 
me on my introduction. 

I was too much occupied in comparing her 
with my preconceived ideal to pay much heed to 
her dress. I had expected to see a dark woman ; 
she was fair, with liquid eyes of grayish blue, and 
a nondescript complexion, slightly browned by 
exposure to the keen sea air of our coast. I had 
expected to see a woman of reserved bearing, a 
sphinx-like person, dealing out weal and woe with 
calm, unmoved exterior ; she entered the room 
with frank and impetuous grace, as if eager to 
meet the cordial welcome of my aunt, with whom 
she was already in a few weeks on the footing of 
an old and dear friend. 

“ This can never be Dr. X.’s grass widow,” I 
said to myself, as I met her friendly look and 
smile and abandoned myself to the charm of her 
sympathetic presence. A charm Mrs. Ingers un- 
doubtedly had, though it was not the charm of 
dazzling beauty or mysterious reserve, but rather 
of manner and look and voice. Her figure was 
tall and graceful, but you would not have said 
that she was beautiful till she began to talk. It 
was then that you began to be struck with the 
fineness with which her features were outlined. 
There was something singularly attractive in her 
voice, a certain indescribably sympathetic ring. 
It was the last voice in the world to be associated 
with any thought of cruel harm ; rather was it 


40 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


most eloquently suggestive of . tenderness and 
kindly feeling. It quite bore out what she said 
of herself to my cousin Mary : that the one thing 
in the world she cared for was affection, that she 
did covet people’s affection, that it was so nice to 
be loved and thought pleasantly of. “ Particu- 
larly by men,” was Mary’s comment when she 
told me this ; but therein I think Mary, though a 
good-natured girl enough, showed a spice of 
jealousy, for nothing could have been prettier or 
more delicate than Mrs. Ingers’ attentions to my 
invalid aunt. 

My aunt was an invalid, confined to her couch 
and to carriage exercise, with great stores of small 
talk ready to discharge themselves upon any good 
listener, and Mrs. Ingers was a good listener. To 
do my aunt justice, she was a good talker, with 
a steady, gentle voice, a thoughtful woman and 
a great reader ; and Mrs. Ingers listened with 
exemplary patience and show of interest, even 
when the talk went beyond her depth. 

Next to the quiet enjoyment of conversing her- 
self, my aunt liked to see anybody giving an 
attentive ear to her husband, and in this also Mrs. 
Ingers showed the utmost consideration. My 
uncle ardently liked her; his reception of her was 
benevolence itself. 

Before the arrival of Mr. Ingers there had been 
some speculation between his irreverent daughter 
and myself as to what would be the subject of the 


DR. X.’S STRANGE PATIENT. 4I 

reverend gentleman’s first remark after the usual 
formalities. There was a big political speech on 
the Irish question in the newspaper, and I was 
inclined to think that my uncle would plunge at 
once into this, being too much of a philosopher 
to be engrossed by local affairs. His daughter, 
on the other hand, was positive that he would be- 
gin with the escaped convict. I groaned at the 
mention of him. We had a small bet on the 
subject. 

Mrs. Brown as it happened led off before her 
husband had a chance of showing what was upper- 
most in his mind. 

“ I hope you were not very much frightened last 
night, Mrs. Ingers,” she said. “We were all in 
such a state of consternation here. About that 
dreadful man who has run away from the prison, 
you know,” she added, in answer to Mrs. Ingers’ 
inquiring look. 

Mary rose to ring for tea, and as she passed me, 
whispered in triumph : “ I win. Look out for 
Grendel. Papa is certain to bring in Grendel.” 

It looked extremely probable ; for Mr. Brown 
had brought down his shaggy eyebrows over his 
deep-set eyes and begun to stroke his long patri- 
archal white beard as was his manner before mak- 
ing a remark. But it generally took him some 
little time to get into position for conversational 
fire. 

“ My cousin,” said Mary, spoiling her own 


42 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


chance of winning the bet in her eagerness to 
chaff me, “ hopes he will visit the Manse. He 
won’t believe in the danger.” 

But there isn’t any real danger, is there ? ” 
asked Mrs. Ingers, turning to me, with her brows 
slightly knit. 

“ Not the least,” said I confidently. “ They are 
certain to catch him in a day or two. My cousin 
talks about him as if he were a man-eating tiger. 
The utmost he is likely to do is to plunder a 
scare-crow of its clothes, and steal a few turnips 
or dried fish to keep himself alive.” 

“ I don’t know about that, George,” said Mrs. 
Brown, in her gentle voice. “ I assure you we are 
all very much excited about him. People accus- 
tomed to town life and to police protection don’t 
realize the danger. I am afraid he will not be 
content to subsist on turnips and dried fish.” 

Mr. Brown again worked his eyebrows and 
stroked his beard as if about to speak, but Mrs. 
Ingers was not familiar with the symptoms, and 
anticipated him. 

“ We do not put much faith in the police,” she 
said. “ My husband always keeps a revolver by 
him at night when we live in the country, and he 
insisted upon my bringing it with me when I 
came here. You know country houses are very 
often attacked by burglars.” 

And can you really use a revolver, my dear ? ” 
asked my aunt, half-rising from her couch in CIS- 


DR. X.’S STRANGE PATIENT. 


43 


tonishment. “ I should be afraid to take a loaded 
one in my hand for fear of shooting myself. I 
should be more likely to do that than to shoot 
the burglar. But then, I am so very nervous. 
And you could really use it? I admire your 
courage, my dear.” 

“ I am afraid my courage would ebb if it came 
to that,” laughed Mrs. Ingers. “ But I used to 
practice shooting with my brothers when I was a 
girl.” 

Ah, that alters the case,” replied Mrs. Brown. 

But I would rather trust the police.” 

Mary and I joined with Mrs. Ingers in depre- 
ciating the police, but Mrs. Brown made a gallant 
defence of them, saying that she thought people 
were generally unjust to them, and did not make 
fair allowance for the difficulties and the dangers 
of running down a desperate criminal. They 
could not always be on the spot to prevent crime, 
and they often made very clever captures. 

Mrs. Brown would have gone on in this strain 
for some time, as, indeed, she could have done on 
almost any topic, being, as most invalids are when 
confined to the house, well charged with thoughts 
accumulated during her enforced loneliness and 
inaction ; but she paused, seeing that Mr. Brown 
betrayed his usual symptoms of having something 
to say. She paused and looked at her husband, as 
if waiting for his remark. He spoke in a peculiar 
loud staccato tone, with very distinct syllabifica- 


44 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


tion, carrying his pulpit voice into private conver- 
sation, as was his habit, especially in the company 
of strangers. Mary and I watched eagerly for his 
first words, thinking it just possible that he might 
after all change the subject of talk, and plunge 
into politics. 

“ I observe from the newspaper,” he began very 
deliberately, “ that the person in question — I 
mean the escaped convict — ” 

At this point, Mary withdrew to a distant 
window, and I followed her. We discussed in 
low but animated tones whether Mary had won 
her bet or not, I arguing that the convict had 
been introduced by Mrs. Brown, and that we 
must wait for an independent ab initio remark by 
the reverend gentleman before our wager could 
be decided. 

All unconscious of this side-issue, Mr. Brown, 
distracted for an instant by the movement, smiled 
benignantly at Mrs. Ingers, and resumed. 

“ I observe that this escaped convict, whose 
name, it seems, is Arthur Roper — his original 
name, that is to say, not his alias^ for he may have 
many of them — comes from Manchester originally. 
It is, of course, a remote possibility, but it might 
so happen, and that would be very curious, that 
you had known him in his better estate. May I 
ask is it so ? ” 

Mrs. Ingers looked a little disconcerted at the 
questions, 


DR. X.’S STRANGE PATIENT. 45 

‘‘ What a very foolish question, William,” cried 
Mrs. Brown, interposing before Mrs. Ingers could 
find anything to say. 

“What is this that papa has been saying?” 
asked Mary, returning to the circle. 

“ He has just asked Mrs. Ingers whether she 
knew the convict Roper in his better days,” said 
Mrs. Brown, with a laugh. Mary laughed heartily, 
and Mrs. Ingers recovered herself and joined in. 

“ It is like one of our farmers here,” resumed 
Mrs. Brown, “ who happened to meet a Bengalee 
medical student. ‘ So you come from India ! ’ he 
said ; ‘ I have a son in Ceylon myself, in the coffee 
planting line. Maybe you’ve come across him.’ ” 

“ I only put it as a remote possibility,” pleaded 
Mr. Brown, joining in the laugh at his own ex- 
pense. 

“ It would have been a more reasonable ques- 
tion,” continued his chatty wife, “ to ask whether 
Mrs. Ingers was acquainted with Mr. Wood, the 
owner of the yacht, who saw him escaping.” 

Mrs. Ingers hastened to say that she did know 
Mr. Wood ; and, in answer to questions from Mrs. 
Brown, told us a few things about him : that he 
was a man of fortune, the son of a wealthy mer- 
chant, very clever and accomplished ; that he was 
a great authority in amateur theatricals; that 
painting was his hobby, and that he used his 
yacht to visit the most beautiful places on the 
coast, • 


46 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


“ He will not find much beauty here,” remarked 
Mrs. Brown. 

But the rocks are very grand,” said Mrs. 
Ingers. ‘‘ And Mr. Wood has not the ordinary 
ideas about beauty.” She seemed to be quite 
enthusiastic about him. 

Mr. Brown looked preoccupied while this con- 
versation went on, stroking his beard meditatively, 
and took advantage of a pause to get under way 
again. 

“ It is often made a subject of remark,” he 
said, ** as a very curious thing that you rarely 
meet any stranger without discovering when you 
get into conversation, that you have some com- 
mon acquaintance. It is remarked upon, I say 
as curious, but rightly understood and properly 
considered, so to speak, it is not curious at all ; 
rather it would be curious if it were not so. It is 
not the smallness of the world, as has been said, 
but the smallness relatively of certain sections or 
circles of individuals in it, who occupy similar 
positions in life, travel at the same seasons to very 
much the same places with very much the same 
objects, put up at the same kind of hotels, and get 
acquainted one with another. Therefore it is not 
surprising that Mrs. Ingers should know about 
Mr. Wood, for how many persons, do you suppose, 
can afford to keep yachts? And that limited 
number of persons naturally must have common 


DR. X.’S STRANGE PATIENT. 47 

interests that bring them into contact at a con- 
siderable variety of points.” 

Mrs. Brown cast down her eyes and smiled ; it 
was not the first time she had heard this theory 
propounded. It was new to Mrs. Ingers, apparent- 
ly, for she listened to it with a show of interest and 
even animation, and she looked at the rugged and 
shaggy but venerable philosopher admiringly. 
“ How very clever! ” she said. “ I never thought 
of that before.” 

Thus encouraged, the philosopher fairly took 
possession of the house. He was loquacious 
enough once he had got a fair start. 

“ The generality of people,” he went on, are 
content to look at the mere surface of facts ; they 
do not apply the reasoning faculties to get down 
to the roots and causes of things. And yet there 
is a concatenation between circumstances appar- 
ently the most diverse which is very curious and 
very beautiful, when you can establish it to your 
satisfaction.” 

He paused ; but pulled down his eyebrows and 
stroked his beard and kept his mouth half-open, 
as if there were more to come. 

“ And to the dissatisfaction of other people,” I 
muttered ; “ that is also essential to make a theory 
really beautiful as well as curious.” 

Mr. Brown took no notice of the interruption. 
He probable did not hear it. “ For example,” 
he continued, has it ever occurred to you how 


48 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


direct the connection is between Free Trade and 
the immorality which, I regret to say, is, from all 
that I read in the public prints, unfortunately so 
prevalent among the upper classes ?” 

Mrs. Ingers looked rather dismayed at this 
grave question, and shook her head, with a faint 
smile. Mrs. Brown, with her usual tact, saw that 
her visitor had had enough of my philosophic 
uncle, and came to the rescue. 

“ That is, no doubt, a very fine theory, William,” 
she said, “ and very sound ; but it is too deep for 
us poor women. Our brains are not equal to it. 
Don’t )^ou think, Mrs. Ingers, that it is on questions 
of that kind that we become aware of own inferi- 
ority?” 

Mrs. Ingers agreed eagerly. 

“ It’s all a matter of education,” cried my uncle ; 
but he looked not displeased at the compliment 
to his sex, and dropped the subject. 

Mary and I walked back to Garacraig with 
Mrs. Ingers. She was delightfully free from stiff- 
ness and reserve. She had made friends at once 
with her neighbors at the Manse, and she accept- 
ed me as one of the family, entitled to the same 
favorable terms of social commerce. 

Very much to my surprise, I learned in the 
course of the walk that it was on the recommenda- 
tion of Doctor H. that she had come to Garacraig. 
And glad she was that she had come. She was 
enthusiastic in praise of our bracing air; her 


9 


t)R. X.’S STRANGE PATIENT. 49 

gallops on the sands had made another woman of 
her. 

So she was the doctor’s patient after all. I was 
so astonished that I could not help confiding to 
Mary what the doctor had said ; adding, I am 
afraid, that it only showed what fools doctors 
could be. 

Wait till you see, Georgie,” said my cousin. 

“That shows how spiteful women can be,” 
I retorted. 

We certainly encountered no bursts of passion 
or marvellous incidents on the following day, when 
we accompanied Mrs. Ingers on a benevolent 
visit to some-of the old fisherwomen in whom she 
took an interest. But on the day after that, 
things did become a little more lively, as you 
shall hear. 


50 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


CHAPTER V. 

WAS IT A SIGNAL? 

On the second afternoon after my arrival at the 
Manse, I announced to my cousin Mary that I was 
out for a solitary walk by the sea, and “a big think ” 
over things in general. What put me into this 
mood, it would not interest my readers to know. 
It was my first holiday since I had begun life in 
earnest, my first pause in the race, and I wished 
to be alone to exercise freely my privilege as a 
rational man of looking before and after. Per- 
haps, too, my relations with Mary were not quite 
what I had hoped for, and the young medico, Er- 
rol — but I will not trouble whoever cares to read 
this narrative with my private affairs. Enough 
to say that I was moved to take my pipe and 
stroll out with my face set seawards, meaning to 
make for an old churchyard on the links within 
hearing of the sleepless waters, and sit there 
among the tombs, and smoke and think and watch 
the stars come out. 

Whether tobacco is an aid to thought, and how 
far, and in what manner, are nice questions upon 
which the learned are not yet in complete agree- 
ment. I do not mean whether smoking is on the 


WAS IT A SIGNAL? 


51 


whole good or bad for man ; that is another ques- 
tion, upon which it may be remarked that there 
are very few smokers who have not at one time or 
another regretted having ever acquired the habit. 
But does smoking help the contemplative mind? 
It may be a very nasty habit and yet do this. 
Does it scatter the thinker’s ideas, or does it help 
him to consecrate them, and so advance the solu- 
tion of knotty problems? It is undoubtedly a 
widespread belief among smokers that the latter 
is the effect ; that a pipe soothes the nerves, lulls 
distracting impulses, and leaves the mind free to 
apply its powers evenly and with full strength to 
whatever is set before it. But there are not want- 
ing sceptical persons who hold that this is a mere 
illusion. That a pipe puts you into a tranquil mood, 
most fit for meditation and deep thought, they 
cannot deny ; but they say that in the mood thus 
produced by the fumes of tobacco you only 
fancy that you are thinking; that you really 
make less progress than if you were not smoking, 
only the smoking makes you so tranquil and con- 
tented that you are quite satisfied with whatever 
passes through your mind. We must probably 
fall back on the safe conclusion that tobacco acts 
differently on different constitutions, for was not 
the philosopher Hobbes a smoker, who contrived 
to do a good deal of hard thinking in his day and 
generation ? 

However the theory may be settled, undoubt- 


52 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


edly, as a matter of fact, upon my particular con- 
stitution, on this quiet August evening tobacco 
did not so act as to excite and clear my powers of 
resolute meditation. It rather co-operated with 
the soothing influences of the time and scene. It 
was the hour of rest from labor. A ploughman 
passed me on his way to the smithy, to have a 
loose horse-shoe fixed, sitting sideways on the 
slow pacing-horse, whistling, the reins on the 
horse’s neck. In a turnip-field near at hand I saw 
Andrew, the Minister’s man, his hands deep in his 
pockets, a black cutty in his mouth ; he had fin- 
ished his survey of the drills and was making for 
the roadside and the whistling ploughman, with 
long leisurely strides, emitting a thick cloud at 
every third step. He undoubtedly found solace 
in the narcotic herb. Seawards was a grass-field, 
in which some cattle who had finished their even- 
ing meal lay winking at the declining sun, moving 
their tails uneasily now and then, too lazy to whisk 
off the midges. A low, drowsy murmur came 
from the sea itself, across the marshy flats and the 
yellow bent grass of the sand hillocks on the 
border of the beach. 

The purity of the air, the silence, the absence of 
movement, struck forcibly on my senses as if 
streaming in voluminously to fill up a void. And 
so I followed my long shadow toward the sea, 
pulling contentedly at my pipe, my strenuous in- 
tention of having a ‘‘ big think ” deferred till { 


WAS IT A SIGNAL? 


53 

should reach the spot where I purposed to sit with 
all the circumstances favorable for mental con- 
centration. 

To a stranger the country round me would 
have seemed as bare, monotonous, and featureless 
as any tract of the habitable globe could be. Not 
a tree, not a hedgerow, to be seen when I had 
passed the brow of the hollow in which lay 
the Manse and Garacraig ; nothing visible, turn 
where I would, but alternate fields of turnips, 
grass, and green corn, green corn, grass and 
turnips — all in big, rectangular plots, separated 
by uniform fences of dry stone wall or wire- 
paling. But I had spent my boyhood here, and 
memory supplied the plain landscape with many 
points of interest. Here, in the field on the right, 
Andrew had first allowed me to hold the plow, 
and I could still remember the wrench from the 
stilts that had almost pulled my arms out of their 
sockets. There, on the left, the same agricultural 
authority had rebuked me in biting and never-to- 
be-forgotten words for not knowing the difference 
between a turnip and a “ scalich.” A bit of the 
stone dyke a hundred yards off, that, to the casual 
eye, was a bit of a stone dyke and nothing more, 
was individualized and endeared to me as the 
spot where I had sat one evening reading “ The 
Woman in White ” till tlie light failed and I had 
to hurry home to my candle in a fever of sus- 
pense. Among the monotonous sand-dunes in 


54 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


front of me, my eyes rested with joyful recognition 
on the very hillock where I had shot at — and 
missed — my first rabbit. I could still hear the 
rustle of the bents through which the creature 
had scampered off, frightened but unhurt. To 
the passing tourist, if ever a tourist was misguided 
enough to pass that way, one twenty yards of the 
coast would have seemed as good, or as bad, as 
another ; to the boy whose solitary playground 
they had been for years, every hillock had its 
little associations. And to eyes thus quickened 
by many memories, the plain landscape, under 
^he level rays that lightened up the heights and 
cast deep shadows on the hollows, assumed a 
variety that became almost picturesque. Beyond 
all was the ever-changing, ever-interesting sea, 
with its great masses of soft color. 

Thus I walked on, with my pipe for genial com- 
pany, and thoughts that chased one another 
slowly and tenderly, striding on with contented 
steps to the spot where it was my set purpose to 
sit down for serious meditation. Between the 
arable land and the billowy sand-dunes was a 
narrow, level stretch, covered mostly with smooth 
green turf, but broken here and there by low 
sand-heaps, which the long brown bents claimed 
for their own, and here and there by strips and 
patches of marshy ground, where regiments of tall 
green weeds found nourishment. For a mile or 
rnore reached this level turf without other inter- 


WAS IT A SIGNAL? 


55 


ruption, save that right in the middle of it, an a 
slightly raised platform, rose a building that 
looked in the distance like a miniature walled 
town, with a crowd of irregular chimneys and 
spires projecting above the fortification. This 
was the old burying-ground where the rude fore- 
fathers of the parish slept, at a distance from the 
habitation of the living, in the solitude of the 
lonely links, with the restless sea sounding its 
changes over them. The ruins of the old parish 
church, deserted now for more that a century, 
stood within the circuit of the walls. Tradition 
said that this spot, now so lonely, was once the 
centre of the parish, and that all the seaward half 
had been swallowed up by a tremendous storm. 
Between the old churchyard and the sea a group 
of sand-hills were piled up to unusual height and 
thickness, and it was the fancy of the neighbor- 
hood, though not much given to superstition, that 
the sea beat there with unusual force, and that 
during storms bands of fiends gathered and howled 
encouragement to the waves, as if they would 
fain get possession of the consecrated ground. 

Just before I left the rough cart road and en- 
tered on the grassy flat of which I have spoken as 
lying between the sandbanks and the ploughland, 
I noticed a small schooner in the ofifing, its sails 
white in the sinking sunlight. It was the only 
moving thing visible, and it was moving slowly. 
The repose of the scene was perfect. I walked 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


56 

with slackened step along the soft grassy level to- 
wards the churchyard, and the yacht was hidden 
from my view by a higher range of sandhills. 

Presently, as I advanced, my eye was caught by 
another moving object, a small red flag fluttering 
in the faint wind on the high dunes between the 
churchyard and the sea. It was hardly bigger 
than the red flag that golfers use to mark their 
holes ; and but for the place in which it appeared, 
on the seaward face of a sandhill, almost at the top, 
I might have supposed that this game had been 
introduced into Garvalt during my absence. But 
I knew every foot of the ground, and saw, from 
its position, that it could not be a golf flag. The 
next instant I connected it with the vessel I had 
seen in the offing. Could it be a smuggler’s sig- 
nal ? Smuggling had been suspected in the parish. 

Curiosity prompted me to stroll in the direc- 
tion of the flag and see what was to be seen. With 
this view I slightly altered my course. 

Let me describe more exactly the position of 
the churchyard. It lay right across the level on a 
slight rise, an oblong enclosure with four walls 
about breast-high. The ground on which it lay 
was a little higher than the valley, but immediate- 
ly beyond the seaward wall the sandbanks rose 
abruptly in mound after mound till the highest 
overtopped the tallest monument of the place of 
tombs. It was from the seaward face of the high- 
est that the flag was displayed. 


WAS IT A SIGNAL? 


57 


Now, I was within thirty or forty yards of the 
enclosure, and making for the middle of the north 
wall facing me, where there was a flight of steps, 
when I first caught sight of the flag. I changed 
my direction, therefore, to the left, meaning to 
pass the north-east corner of the churchyard and 
climb the sandbanks. 

But as I neared this corner, walking on the 
noiseless turf, I heard sounds from the church- 
yard which made me stop and listen. The height 
of the wall and the elevation of the ground pre- 
vented me from seeing into the churchyard : I 
could see only the tops of the higher tombstones, 
and a portion of the ruined wall of the old church 
adjoining the north-east corner. It was from there 
that the sounds seemed to proceed. 

I heard a woman sobbing, and presently the 
broken words reached my ears : 

Ah me, why have you always come between 
-me and happiness ? It is too, too cruel.” 

Above her sobs I heard a gruff hard voice make 
answer, “ You say nothing of what you have done 
for me.” 

“For you!” she cried, in scornful reproach. 
Sobs seemed to choke her utterance. For a mo- 
ment only this inarticulate grief was audible. Then 
she burst out again passionately — “ This is the 
third time. Oh, you have ri^ned my life. It is 
hard, too, too hard to bear ! Why was I brought 
into the world to be persecuted like this ? ” 


58 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


“ You forget that I should have been another 
man if I had never known you.” 

To this there was no answer but her weeping. 

“ You might give a fellow another chance,” said 
the gruff voice. 

Still no answer. 

“ Just enough to give me a start.” 

Still she did not answer, and the gruff voice 
continued to plead. 

“ It’s been deuced hard lines for me all along. 
I should never have been down but for you. You 
can’t leave me in this fix. Only enough for a 
start. To-morrow at two. Bring it then. I can 
hang on till then. If you don’t by ” 

I have transcribed all that I heard ; but I was 
more than a listener during part of this strange 
colloquy — I had to make up my mind what to do. 
The first words so arrested me that I listened as 
if I had been at a play, without thinking of my 
own position — listened with absorbed attention, 
surprised beyond measure, and trying to make 
out the situation of the speakers. Who were 
they? and what was their painful conference 
about ? 

In the woman’s first words, agitated and broken 
as they were, I seemed to recognize the voice of 
Mrs. Ingers. I was certain of this when she 
spoke again. Ho^ had she come there? Who 
was this man whose presence was so disturbing to 
her? How had they met in this lonely place ? 


WAS IT A SIGNAL? 


59 

It must surely have been by appointment. 
Was the red flag a signal between them ? 

It was this idea that first made me think of my 
own position as a listener. If they were there for 
privacy, I could not play the eavesdropper. 

My first impulse was to walk quietly away and 
leave them to themselves. But this the woman’s 
obvious distress forbade. When the gruff voice 
began to be importunate, it was evident that she 
was in danger. She was certainly so if they were 
alone — and no other voice was audible. I decided 
to stay, and hold myself ready to interfere if it 
became necessary. 

I had hardly come to this conclusion, when the 
gruff voicechanged from an entreating to a threat- 
ening tone. 

The menacing tones enraged me at the ruffian ; 
but I have always had a horror of intruding into 
other people’s affairs unbidden, and I was suffi- 
ciently master of myself to reflect that an abrupt 
interruption might not be welcomed by the lady, 
if the meeting between her and the man was not 
accidental. I decided, therefore, to show myself 
as quickly as possible above the wall, and let them 
see me without my seeming to be aware of their 
presence. 

To do this, it was necessary that I should turn 
the northeast corner of the wall on my left, pass 
along by the seaward wall, above which my head 
would be visible, and perhaps climb some way up 


6o 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


the long, thin grass of the sandbanks between the 
churchyard and the sea. 

I executed this movement ; and, as soon as I 
judged that my head and shoulders were visible, 
I cleared my throat, looking steadily towards the 
sea. 

Immediately I heard a faint scream and a 
rustle. I turned, and saw a man jumping over 
graves and flat tomb-stones, making rapidly for 
the farther wall. The ground inside the church- 
yard was several feet higher than the ground out- 
side, and he swung himself over the wall easily, 
and disappeared. Disappeared ; but not before 
I had noted his dress — an old pilot jacket, dilapi- 
dated trousers, and an old Scotch bonnet. As he 
swung himself over the wall, the jacket lifted, and 
I saw a white coat underneath marked with broad 
arrows. It was the convict. 

My readers will probably not be so much sur- 
prised as I was. In view of the part that the 
convict had in the events I have undertaken to 
record, I have considered it necessary to mention 
the conversation I had with my cousin about him, 
and that must have served as a preparation for 
his appearance. But till I saw this scarecrow 
figure leaping nimbly over the churchyard wall, I 
had never thought of the convict Roper in con- 
nection with Mrs. Ingers, although, as soon as I 
saw him, I remembered in a flash how we had all 


% 


WAS IT A SIGNAL? 6l 

laughed at my uncle’s idea that Mrs. Ingers might 
have met him “ in his better estate.” 

I stood stock-still, staring at the spot where he 
had disappeared. Then I looked at Mrs. Ingers. 
She was seated on a tombstone near the bit of 
ruinous church-wall ; her head was bent, she held 
her handkerchief to her face, and her frame was 
violently agitated. 

I took a step or two to run after the man ; but 
the sounds that came from Mrs. Ingers made me 
hesitate, and induced me to observe her more 
closely. 

She was in convulsions of laughter. 

I raised my hat, and stammered, “ I beg par- 
don ; ” though, in the confusion of the moment, 
with an overpowering sense of the awkwardness 
of my position, I could not frame an articulate 
statement of the subject of my apology, and “ for 
interrupting you ” died away upon my lips. 

My words seemed to augment her merriment. 
I turned half round, to go away. 

Her laughter stopped. “ Please do not go 
away,” she pleaded, in a distressed voice. “ I 
have been so terribly frightened.” 

The word “ frightened ” changed my mind 
again. I determined to give chase. I was glad 
of something to do, as a relief from my embar- 
rassed position. I ran along the narrow space 
between the seaward wall and the sandbanks 
towards the side on which he had disappeared. 


62 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


I heard her call after me. 

“ Don’t, don’t. He has a revolver. He will 
shoot you. Do come back.” 

But I ran on till I turned the corner and had a 
view of the ground to the south of the church- 
yard. 

No living thing was visible but a couple of 
sheep, which were standing a few yards away 
from the churchyard and looking back, as if they 
had been startled. At sight of me they made 
another start, and again halted and looked back. 

The man must have taken refuge among the 
grassy mounds which rose to the south of the 
churchyard, beginning with an easy slope a few 
yards from the wall. The hollows that separated 
them were deep enough to conceal him. - I ran a 
step or two forward, with the intention of climb- 
ing to the top of the nearest, from which the 
fugitive might be visible. 

But I stopped on hearing the voice of Mrs. 
Ingers begging me in agonized entreaty to stay. 
“Will nobody listen to me?” she cried, in the 
same despairing tones that had first arrested my 
attention. “ For God’s sake, let him go !” 

She had come close to the wall, and was lean- 
ing over it with hands clasped in front of her, 
looking in my direction with knit brows, but not 
looking at me, “ mind and sight distractedly com- 
mixed.” 

“ What is the use of chasing him ? I tell you 


WAS IT A SIGNAL? 63 

lie fs armed. You will only tempt him to add 
murder to his other crimes.” 

I made a few reluctant steps toward her. It 
was undoubtedly the most prudent course to 
desist from the pursuit. And yet, though I am 
far from being a person of ardent and headstrong 
physical courage, I was so excited by what I had 
overheard of this ruffian’s attempt to levy black- 
mail on a defenceless woman that I would have 
chased him at all hazards if I had not been irre- 
sistibly convinced by her manner that she had 
other reasons than a regard for my safety in beg- 
ging me to desist. Never in my life have I been 
in such an awkward and puzzling position. Like 
Hamlet, I had fallen into circumstances where 
some action seemed to be imperatively required 
of me, while action was paralyzed by inability to 
see my way clear, and doubt whether I might not 
do more harm than good by acting without full 
knowledge. A half wish crossed my mind that I 
had gone away quietly and left them to settle 
their own affairs. But any such wish was too late 
now ; what did she really wish me to do ? After 
all, it was her affair, and the tone of her despair- 
ing cry, Will nobody listen to me ? ” seemed to 
imply that however badly the man had behaved 
to her, she had reasons for wishing him not to be 
pursued. 

As I came back slowly and doubtfully, checked 
by this consideration, but still uncertain, I kept 


64 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


my eyes fixed on her face, engrossed by the de- 
sire to divine her re»l mind. Oddly enough, as I 
looked, an entirely irrelevant idea took possession 
of me, a cool, critical recognition of her remark- 
able beauty in her present attitude. Her face 
was flushed, and the fine outlines of her features 
were made clearer and firmer by the intensity of 
her mood. I have already said that her beauty 
was not so remarkable in repose ; it was dazzling 
now when her inner being was stirred to the full 
pitch of its energy. 

It was strange that I should have come nearer 
than before to realizing my preconceived ideal of 
her as an imperious Queen of Hearts the very mo- 
ment after her mysterious implication with a low 
ruffian had tainted my first favorable impression 
of her and disturbed me with something like re- 
pulsion. The very purity of the outlines of her 
intense features seemed to protest against the 
degradation of this connection. 

But this intense look lasted only for a moment. 
When she saw that I was disposed to obey her 
and abandon the pursuit of the convict, she again 
began to laugh, musically enough, but heartily, as 
if she were trying to control herself but could not. 

Now, there is nothing so disconcerting and 
uncomfortable as to stand before a person strug- 
gling with a fit of uncontrollable laughter without 
knowing or being able to guess what the laughter 
is about. The discomfort of the position is in- 


WAS IT A SIGNAL ? 


65 


creased when one is uncertain about the propriety 
of one’s own conduct immediately before. I be- 
came a little impatient of my companion’s laugh- 
ter, and I daresay my face betrayed my bewild- 
erment. 

“ Forgive me,” she said, “ for laughing so fool- 
ishly. I beg your pardon, I am sure ; but I really 
cannot help it. The change of scene was so sud- 
den, and there was something so odd in the way 
he jumped over the wall that he put me in mind 
of a harlequinade. You have seen a clown jump- 
ing through a wall when the policeman came up, 
and the policeman’s look of astonishment. It was 
really like that.” And she laughed again. 

I could not quite get rid of an uneasy feeling 
that I had played the part of the ludicrous police- 
man, but her laughter was so infectious, as she 
stood there with her left hand on her side and her 
head thrown back laughing till she panted for 
breath, that 1 joined in a little, though uneasily 
conscious that it might be partly at my own ex- 
pense. She seemed as if she never would have 
done. 

“ I am glad,” I said, at length, “ that it is only 
a laughing matter.” I may possibly have spoken 
in an offended tone. 

This remark seemed to sober her. She sat 
down on a flat gravestone. I came nearer to the 
wall. 

“ You ask me to forgive you for laughing,” I 


66 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


said. “ I ought to ask your forgiveness for in- 
truding as I did.” My sense of the awkwardness 
of this had returned in fresh strength with the 
continuance of her unaccountable mirth. 

** On the contrary,” she answered, “ I am deeply 
indebted to you. Your coming was most fortu- 
nate. I cannot tell you what a relief it was.” 

“ Then you were really in danger?” 

“ In danger? Yes.” She looked round with a 
shudder. “ A good scene for a tragedy this, is it 
not? This lonely churchyard, and the waning 
light. How the darkening valley seems to drink 
in the sound of the sea. You might scream loud 
enough here before anybody heard you, and your 
body might lie for days before anybody came here 
to find it. Fancy,” she continued, with another 
shudder, “ being murdered in a cemetery. There 
would be a certain convenience in it, would there 
not?” 

I tried to smile in appreciation to her hysterical 
humor. Her nerves were evidently unstrung by 
the terrible agitation she had undergone. 

“Now, when I come to think of it,” she went 
on excitedly, “ it was that that made me laugh as 
much as anything, your timid, apologetic look, 
as if you were respectably afraid of intruding 
when really you had come just in time to save 
my life perhaps.” 

I fear I am rather a conventional-minded per- 
son, as a public servant ought to be ; but I had 


WAS IT A SIGNAL? 


67 


sense enough to see the humor of this, and my ap- 
preciative smile was this time more genuine. It 
^conciled me to my awkward position to be able 
'/o laugh at it. * 

“ Had you been long there before you inter- 
posed ? ” she asked, after a pause. There was just 
a touch of anxiety in the question. 

“ Only a minute or two,” I said. Seeing the 
thoughtful, anxious look on her face, I added that 
I came up just in time to hear the ruffian pass 
from begging to threatening. From motives of 
delicacy, I wished to suppress the fact that I had 
heard her exclamations of misery at his repeated 
interferences with her happiness. I was rewarded 
by seeing her countenance clear. 

She sprung up quite lightly from her seat. I 
had better make tracks for home now,” she said. 
“ He may come back.” 

“ Since I have interposed,” I said, may I see 
you safely to Garacraig?” 

“ Certainly, Mr. Brown,” she said, with a comic 
air of exaggerated politeness that made me smile 
in turn, thinking how odd these formal phrases 
sound when barbarous circumstances give them a 
real meaning. 


68 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


CHAPTER VI. 

A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. 

For the first time in my life I found myself in 
the position of helping a woman in real and seri- 
ous danger, and I was proud of it, proud of the 
chance of exercising the noblest privilege of the 
stronger sex, and determined to prove myself 
worthy of the opportunity. 

It was a foolish feeling, no doybt, and looking 
back now, I wonder that there was not mixed with 
it some sense of my own presumption in thinking to 
act as champion to a woman so much my superior 
in — well I may say it, in age, for she must have 
been about thirty, and so very much my superior in 
experience of the world’s ways. But the truth 
must be told that no thought of this disparity 
troubled me : I believe it rather contributed to my 
pride. I thought of her as a woman who had 
suffered, and who did not deserve to suffer. The 
bitter words I had heard her sob out rang in my 
ears as giving her a claim to pity and assistance 
from any man worthy of the name. I daresay 
there is something peculiarly attractive to young 
men in women of mercurial temperament. At 
any rate, her quick transitions of feeling puzzled 


A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. 69 

and at the same time fascinated me. The rapid- 
ity with which she had shaken off her fears and 
her anguish of hopeless complaint excited my ad- 
miration. Even the slang phrase she had used 
when she spoke of “ making tracks ” for home, 
struck no jarring note — it was spoken with such 
lightness and playfulness of tone. What courage 
the woman must have, I reflected, to face serious 
and immediate danger with such gayety of heart, 
and what a sense of camaraderie this little touch of 
familiarity established between us. 

It was with unqualified admiration that I pre- 
pared to escort Mr^. Ingers back to Garacraig, 
ready to lend her all the support of my puissant 
arm, and to die in her defence if necessary. 

But there was another awkward and somewhat 
perplexing incident before we got fairly under- 
way. 

I had forgotten all about the red flag in the ex- 
citement of what had happened, but as I climbed 
over the churchyard wall to join her — thinking 
this more courteous than to skirt the enclosure, 
and wait for her to join me at the other side — the 
red flag again caught my attention, and I remem- 
bered with some confusion that I had suspected 
it to be a signal between her and the convict. 
Looking at her, I observed that her eyes were also 
fixed upon it. 

don’t know what that can be,” I said. 

There was just a trace of hesitation before she 
answered. “ It is my handkerchief ; I had al- 


70 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


most forgotten it. Let us go and fetch it, if it 
would not take you too much out of the way.” 

Her handkercief ! Then there had been a signal 
between them after all. But I was too happy in 
my duty to be much moved by this. 

“ The sandhills are rather troublesome to climb,” 
I said. “ I will run and bring it to you if you will 
wait here.” 

But she shuddered at the idea of remaining any 
longer alone in the churchyard with the day be- 
ginning to darken ; so we descended the steps 
over the north wall, and climbed to the flag to- 
gether. It stood, as I have already said, on the 
high mounds, covered with the long grass known 
as “ bents,” between the churchyard and the sea. 

The pole of the flag was an ordinary hazel 
walking stick, but I was somewhat surprised to 
find that the red handkerchief, a bit of dainty silk, 
was attached to it by tapes, and that the tapes 
were sewn on to the handkerchief. The flying of 
the flag was evidently a premeditated thing. It 
must have been a signal after all. 

Why, I asked myself did she not go home with- 
out taking any notice of it ? I would not have 
spoken of it if she had not. I had no desire to 
pry into her secrets. It was very embarrassing. 

I tried to conceal any appearance of surprise at 
the marks of premeditation, but she must have 
read my thoughts, for presently she said with a 
smile : 


A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. 7 1 

** You must think me a very eccentric person. 
But it was so dull here that I amused myself this 
afternoon by fancying myself alone on a desert 
island, and mounted this red handkerchief as a 
signal of distress to carry out the illusion. It was 
a foolish thing to do, for I believe it attracted the 
man here.” 

I was a little piqued that she should have so 
poor an opinion of my intelligence as to try to 
palm off such a tale upon me. I was pained, 
besides, that she should have condescended to it. 
I quite understood her motive. It was natural 
that she should try to disguise her previous ac- 
quaintance with the convict. But I already knew 
it, and attached no discredit to her on account of 
it: not only so, but in my indignation that so 
admirable a woman should be the victim of such 
a miscreant I was eager to be of service to her if 
I could in protecting her against his persecution. 
Had I not heard her say that he had ruined her 
life, and that this was the third time he had come 
between her and happiness? I was silent, there- 
fore, for a little after she spoke, considering how 
best I could let her understand that I knew more 
than from motives of delicacy I had at first ad- 
mitted, partly to save her the shame of commit- 
ting herself to farther deceits, and partly with the 
hope that she might give me more of her confi- 
dence, and thus enable me more effectually to 
help her. 


72 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


“ I suppose,” I said at length, taking up her 
remark that the flag might have attracted the 
man, “ I suppose it was the convict of whom we 
were speaking the other day ?” 

“ It was. At least, I believe so. He had close- 
cropped hair, and there were broad arrows on his 
clothes.” 

This was worse and worse. It pained me so 
that I felt I must undeceive her. 

“ I thought,” I said, doing my best to preserve 
an indifferent tone, but feeling my face burn, “ I 
thought from what I overheard that you must 
have met him before.” 

She gave me a sharp and suspicious look ; but 
though there was some anger in her face, there 
was no trace of shame. I, on the other hand, was 
conscious of wearing an embarrassed and guilty 
look. 

“You look,” she said sharply, “as if you sus- 
pected me of being in league with this convict. 
Do you suppose that I deliberately made a signal 
to him ?” 

I am afraid I stammered a little in my answer, 
when the question was put to me so directly; 
but I contrived to say that it would be too absurd 
to suppose anything of the kind. 

“Then what do you suppose?” 

“ I don’t see my way to suppose anything. 
Only I can’t understand why the flag should have 


A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. 

attracted him. I should have thought it would 
have frightened him away.” 

“ Does it not occur to you as possible that he 
might have seen that there was only a woman beside 
the flag, and that he counted upon overpowering 
her if she did not give him what he wanted, which 
was probably money to help him to get away?” 

“Quite so, of course,” I said. “I see now.” 

I was hurt that she had not seen fit to give me 
more of her confidence, but my remembrance of 
her misery half an hour before far outweighed the 
effect of her disingenuousness, and I made every 
allowance for the motive to it. She had a perfect 
right to keep her secret if she chose so to do. 

After we had secured the flag, she was still lin- 
gering on the sandy bluff, looking out to sea as if 
in admiration of the scene. It certainly was a 
lovely sight. The soft sheen of the great expanse 
of water in the waning light, here smooth as a 
millpond, there faintly ruffled, suffused with dark 
tints of purple and violet, was singularly beauti- 
ful. The yacht that I had seen as I came up was 
now nearer the shore, not more than half a mile 
out, tacking in-shore against the seaward breeze, 
with sails full set, but making little headway. 

“ How beautiful it is !” I said. I always fee/ the 
likeness of a ship to a sea-bird when I see one in 
the offing like that.” 

I looked at her when I said this. There was an 


74 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


interest other than that of the beautiful in her 
look, a something markedly keen and practical. 

‘‘Yes,” she said, “it is beautiful.” But the 
words were purely mechanical. Her thoughts 
obviously did not go with them. She seemed to 
be trying to make out the vessel. 

“You look,” I said, with a laugh which I fear 
was somewhat forced, “ as if you were still carry- 
ing out the illusion of being on a desert island. 
You are looking as I imagine you might look if 
you had descried a sail, and were watching eagerly 
to see whether it would come to your rescue.” 

“Am I? You see I have a glass, too,” she said, 
producing a small opera-glass from her pocket. 
“ The ship-wrecked mariner does not, as a rule, 
carry an opera-glass, I suppose. A long telescope 
would be more in keeping.” She spoke lightly 
and with animation, as if the sight of the yacht 
had raised her spirits. 

“What business is it of mine?” I thought to 
myself as I marked this farther evidence of pre- 
meditated outlook — for the convict as I supposed. 

As she was adjusting her glass, I looked casually 
along the shore, trying to maintain my indiffer- 
ence. A boat on the beach some two hundred 
yards on the right arrested my attention. 

We spoke at the same moment. 

“Yes, it is. By Jove! There is the convict’s 
boat.” 

“ Where ?” cried she. 


A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. 


75 


‘‘Then you know the yacht cried 1. 

And again our cross examinations were simul- 
taneous. 

I answered her query without waiting for an 
answer to mine, and pointed out the boat. 

“ It must be the boat he came by,” I said ; “ the 
boat he stole from the beach. He came by a 
boat, did he not ?” 

“Yes,” she said uncertainly. 

“ I had better go and secure it,” I said, “and so 
cut off his retreat. He will be caught in a regular 
trap. He cannot run far in this open country 
without being caught.” Although she had objected 
to my chasing him before, I could not suppose 
that she would have any objection to my crippling 
his power of movement by depriving him of his 
boat. 

“ As you please,” she said. “ But is it worth 
while to run the risk of being shot? He is armed, 
as I told you.” 

I hesitated for a moment. But fear of being 
thought a coward was stronger than fear of physi- 
cal danger. I reflected, too, that the risk was not 
so great as it seemed ; for once I got to the boat 
I could soon put myself out of reach of his re- 
volver. 

“ Oh,” I said jauntily, “there’s not much dan- 
ger. I ought to do it. It is a public duty.” And 
I began to move down the sand slope to the 
beach. 


76 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


But at that moment the convict himself ap- 
peared, walking rapidly, almost at a run, across 
the sands toward his boat. 

** You are forestalled,” she said, with a pleasant 
smile ; “ and I am glad of it. If anything had 
happened to you I should never have been able 
to avoid feeling that I was responsible. You 
needn’t go farther, he would be out of reach long 
before you could get near him.” 

We watched the convict’s movements for a 
little in silence. He was evidently a powerful 
ruffian. The sea had ebbed away several yards 
from the boat since he landed, but he seemed to 
find little difficulty in pushing it down through 
the sand ; and once he was off he made it travel 
at a great pace with long sweeping strokes. He 
sculled it right across between us and the yacht. 
Two miles along the coast to the north of us be- 
gan one range of precipitous rocks of which I have 
already spoken ; the coast was similarly rocky and 
precipitous about a mile to the south. The links 
on which we stood formed the margin of a sandy 
bay, a break of two or more miles in the precipi- 
tous coastline. It was among the creeks and caves 
of the cliffs that a fugitive had best chance of 
concealment. 

I believe I see his game,” I cried. “ He is 
making for the rocks on the north.” 

I turned as I said this. She made no answer. 


A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. 77 

She was scanning the yacht intently through her 
glass. 

“ So you know the yatch ?” I said, recurring to 
her ejaculation a few minutes before. 

** Yes,” she said simply; it is Mr. Wood’s 
Foanihell'' 

She said this in the most ordinary tone, as if 
the appearence of the yacht there was entirely 
accidental. To me the recognition suggested 
another possible meaning of the red flag and the 
opera-glass with which she had come provided. 
The flag might not have been a signal to the con- 
vict after all. 

But I resolved that I would ask no questions, 
and would avoid as far as possible showing the 
least curiosity. If she was willing to give me her 
confidence, well and good ; if not, I would not 
solicit it in any way. 

She continued to watch the yacht through her 
glass. 

Suddenly she exclaimed, “ They are putting off 
a boat from the yacht.” 

Are they ?” I answered, and had almost mads 
a movement to hold out my hand for the glass 
before I could check myself. Are they ?” Per- 
haps they mean to give chase to the convict. It 
should be a close race if they try to cut him off 
f.om the rocks. In what direction does the boat 
seem to be steering?” I asked, after a moment. 


78 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


‘‘ I can’t make out,” she said, handing the glass 
to me. 

‘‘ I believe,” I said after a minute’s observation, 
that they are steering.to cut him off.” 

Presently we saw the convict cease rowing and 
look in the direction of the boat. He remained 
for a minute or two in close observation, apparent- 
ly making up his mind what to do ; then he rowed 
rapidly back across the line between us and them, 
and beached his boat 300 yards or so on the right 
at a spot not far from where he had launched it. 
He pushed it up the sands a bit and disappeared 
among the sand-dunes at a run. 

“ They will get the boat now, at any rate,” I 
remarked. 

“ Your sympathies evidently go with the pur- 
suer and not with the pursued,” she said, in a 
laughing tone, but her features twitched so that 
she could hardly command them. She was evi- 
dently disappointed, but whether it was because 
the fugitive had not been caught at once or be- 
cause his capture could now be only a matter of 
time, I was unable to divine;. 

“ I never thought of it before,” I said, but it 
does look as if my sympathies were with law and 
order.” 

“ For my part,” she said, “ I can never see any 
creature chased without hoping that it may out- 
run its pursuers and get cleaj off. It is very fooL 
ish^ I dare say,” 


A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. 79 

" I don’t know about its being foolish,” I said, 
“ but it does seem a somewhat immoral instinct, 
when the thing chased is a fugitive from justice.” 

“ Is a criminal, then, so very different from other 
human beings?” 

Of course it occured to me that he was at least 
so far different that he had broken the law and 
must take the consequences. I saw what she was 
driving at, that any of us might have committed 
the same crime if we had the same temptations. 
That might be very true, but it was no reason why 
I should not desire to see a convict run to earth 
who had knocked down a warder and run off. But 
Mrs. Ingers asked her question with just a grain of 
contempt in her voice, and I did not care to argue 
with her. Was she foolish enough, I asked my- 
self, still to care for this man who, according to 
her own angry reproach, had ruined her life ? If 
she was, I could only pity her, and take it as an 
example of the blind constancy of woman, a 
quality more to be respected than blamed. 

The boat from the yacht was nearing the shore 
rapidly. It did not follow the convict. It was 
making straight for us, and I remarked the fact. 
Further, when we began to move away, the man 
at the rudder seemed to signal to us to stop. We 
stopped accordingly, I at least in some wonder as 
to what was to happen next. 

What happened was that one of the men 
jumped out of the boat and came towards us with 


8o 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


a letter in his hand, and asked the lady whether 
she was Mrs. Ingers. On being answered in the 
affirmative, he delivered the letter to her. She 
read it with studiously impassive face, which I 
must confess I stole a glance at, though I tried 
hard to look indifferently at the landscape. 

She had a little gold pencil-case along with 
some other trinkets at her waist, and she wrote a 
few words of reply on a bit of the envelope, which 
she twisted artistically into the form of a three- 
cornered note. 

He went straight back to the boat, and as soon 
as he was in they pushed off and steered straight 
for the yacht. 

“ Hi I cried. “ Do you know that the man 
in the boat is the runaway convict from Skate- 
ness ?” 

“ What business is it of ours?” asked Mrs. In- 
gers, with a sharpness that startled me. 

The men fortunately did not hear my words, 
but they stopped rowing to listen. It was awk- 
wark rather for me. “ Beg your pardon. All 
I shouted. ** The note will explain every- 
thing.” 


SOME CLEVER MANCEUVRING. 


8i 


CHAPTER VIL 

SOME CLEVER MANCEUVERING. 

The sun had gone down, and several more folds 
of the “gradual dusky veil” of evening had fallen 
when we again set out for Garacraig after this 
episode. 

Mrs. Ingers seemed to feel that she must make 
some amends for the abruptness of the check she 
had given me when I called to the boatmen of 
the yacht. 

“ I hope you will forgive me,” she said, turning 
to me with a very captivating smile, “ for speaking 
as I did. Of course you must know better what 
ought to be done than a poor woman like me. 
But why should we interfere with the man’s 
chances of escaping?” 

“As you please,” I said. “ It is a matter of in- 
difference to me, as long as you are out of danger.” 

“ Oh, I am quite safe now,” she said cheerfully. 
“ If he does not attack us, we may as well let him 
alone.” 

We had descended from the high mounds, and 
were walking now on the soft turf of the grassy 
flat between the sand-dunes and the cornland. 
The twilight lay deeper in the hollow, and the 


82 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


boom of the sea sounded solemnly through it. 
The rustle of my companion’s dress on the grass 
was distinctly audible above the dull beat of our 
almost noiseless steps. I broke the silence with 
an effort. 

“ You are too tender-hearted,” I said. “ I con- 
fess I should like to see the scoundrel in the grasp 
of the law again.” 

“ Why so vindictive ?” she said. “ What do 
you know about him ? He will probably be 
caught to-morrow without your doing constable’s 
work.” 

What did I know about him ? Should I tell her 
what I had heard ? Here was another oppor- 
tunity, almost an invitation. 

“ I know,” I began, “that he — ” 

But unluckily, as I turned my face to her to 
watch the effect of my words, my foot caught in 
something and I stumbled forward. Apparently 
Mrs. Ingers had a keen sense of the ridiculous, 
for a laugh broke from her, instantaneously and 
irresistibly mirthful. In another instant she also 
tripped and stumbled, and her laugh passed into 
a nervous scream of surprise and fright. She in- 
voluntarily caught hold of my arm, when a hoarse 
voice a few yards on our right called to us — 

“ Look out there ! You’ve broken my net, I 
believe.” 

I confess I was a little startled myself; but 
dusk as it was I soon recognized the owner of the 


SOME CLEVER MANOEUVRING. 


83 


voice and understood what had happened. It 
was Sandy Leiper, a molecatcher and notorious 
poacher of the district, and we had stumbled 
against the nets which he was getting ready for 
his poaching operations. He was partly hid by 
one of the hillocks, and we had been too en- 
grossed in our talk to observe him as we came up. 
The nets which he was engaged in straightening 
were hardly distinguishable in the dim light till 
we knew that they were there. 

All right, Sandy,” I called to him. “ There’s 
nothing broken.” I had known him well in my 
school-boy days, and been instructed by him in the 
rudiments of flying fishing and rabbit-snaring. I 
had even been sufficiently in his confidence to be 
allowed to help him in putting his nets in order 
at the appropriate season. 

‘‘ Oh, it’s you, is it, Maister Brown ?” returned 
Sandy coolly. I suppose I needn’t ask you to 
give me a hand to-night ?” 

No, thank you,” I replied, and we passed on. 

I mention this incident because, as I afterwards 
discovered, our local smuggler and poacher was at 
that very time acting in concert with the fugitive 
convict and helping him in his efforts to escape. 
His work upon the nets, which he was in the habit 
of doing openly as if they were fishing-nets, was 
only a pretext. The fugitive was in hiding among 
the rocks, in a retreat that Sandy had shown him, 
and the convict had come to meet him by appoint- 


84 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


ment in order to get some materials for disguise 
when he accidentally encountered Mrs. Ingers. 
All this I learnt from Sandy Leiper afterwards. 
When I asked the poacher where he first met the 
fugitive and why he helped him, Sandy told me 
that he met him on the evening of the day of his 
escape prowling about the links. It will be re- 
membered that the authorities judged that he had 
fled northward, and searched in that direction 
first ; he had really rowed southward. As to his 
motive for helping an escaped convict, Sandy 
could give no clear account. “ The chiel seemed 
terrible hard pressed,” was all I could get out of 
him. I am afraid that Sandy was not, like my- 
self, on the side of law and order. His sympathies 
went the other way ; the police were his natural 
enemies. 

To return, however, to my escorting of Mrs. 
Ingers. 

She had taken my arm when first startled by 
stumbling against the net, and she retained it 
while we resumed our walk homewards. 

“ You seem fated to be my champion to-night,” 
she said, in a soft tone. I should have been 
very much frightened if I had encountered that 
man alone. What is he? You seem to know 
him.” 

I explained to her Sandy’s ostensible avocation, 
and how he was suspected of eking out his living 
by unlawful means. “You see,” I said, “that 


SOME CLEVER MANCEUVRING. 


85 


quiet parish though it is, we have our desperate 
characters. Sandy Leiper is our heroic outlaw. 
We boys used to have a great respect for him. 
There was no depth of law-breaking that we did 
not believe him capable of, and yet somehow he 
never got into trouble, and was on good enough 
terms outwardly with both the exciseman and the 
gamekeeper. He was, and I believe is, very popular 
in the parish, being a generally obliging and handy 
fellow, besides being indispensable for rats and 
moles. Sandy and I were always very good friends. 
I was rather a favorite with him, and very proud 
of his patronage.” 

Friends with a poacher and a smuggler!” 
said Mrs. Ingers slyly. I thought you con- 
sidered that all such lawless characters should be 
hunted down.” 

I made a feeble effort to defend my consistency, 
but the truth is I was inwardly foolish enough to 
be very much pleased that Mrs. Ingers should not 
think of me as too stiff a stickler for dull and 
steady legality — as the most odious of characters 
to young men, a regular prig. And what is more, 
I believe she knew this. Looking back now upon 
our talk that evening, as we w'alked in the dusk 
toward Garacraig, I believe that she deliberately 
laid herself out to befool me, with, I am bound to 
admit, a large measure of success. That she had 
then formed the plan for turning my devotion 
to account, as she afterwards did, I can hardly 


86 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


suppose. I am inclined to think that that grew 
out of subsequent circumstances. They say that 
some women are so fond of power and homage 
that they cannot meet any man without trying 
more or less to make a favorable impression o.i 
him, and attach him to their ear. Probably Mrs. 
Ingers had no more definite motive than this for 
trying to make a conquest of poor me ; it was 
probably force of temperament and habit. She 
had had no male creature to subdue for several 
weeks, and her appetite for conquest must have 
been proportiionately keen. Possibly, too, she 
may have been like a prudent diplomatist, who 
misses no opportunity of making a fresh adherent, 
though he may not see at the moment precisely 
what use to make of him. 

Our stumbling into the poacher’s net had inter- 
rupted me when I was about to tell her what I 
had overheard at the churchyard. I waited for 
her to resume the subject. I was scrupulously 
anxious not to appear inquisitive about her affairs, 
more particularly after I had seen the comm uni- 
after cation between her 'and the yacht, and her 
saying that she was out of danger now. Appar- 
ently the only service she needed^was a safe escort 
to Garacraig. 

Naturally I could not help thinking a good deal 
as we walked along. So much indeed was I per- 
plexed, and, in spite of myself, busy with con- 
jectures, that much as I tried I could find nothing 


SOME CLEVER MANCEUVRING. 87 

to say on any other topic. She broke a some- 
what protracted silence by suddenly making a 
request. 

“ I want you,” she said, “ to say nothing about 
all this to our friends at the Manse.” 

“ The request is quite unnecessary, Mrs. Ingres,” 
I answered, in rather a grand way. “ What I 
have seen and heard, I have seen and heard, as 
an involuntary intruder, and I should no more 
think of making use of it, even in the way of gos- 
sip, than of appropriating money that I found on 
another person’s table.” 

That is very chivalrous,” she said. 

“ It is only common honesty.” 

“ Ah, but there are not many people like that ; 
at least it has not been my fortune to meet them. 
I really don’t deserve it.” 

“You do yourself injustice,” I answered. I 
had, I confess, been somewhat chilled by the mes- 
sage from the yacht, and her perfect silence about 
it ; but I had still a vivid recollection of her per- 
secution by Roper, and her generosity in wishing 
him to get off after all. 

“ And you say this after what you heard ?” 

“ I only heard that your life had been very un- 
/lappy, and that this scoundrel whom you wish to 
let off has been the cause of it.” 

“Unhappy!” she cried, ignoring the second 
part of my remark. “Yes. How I envy a quiet, 
even, untroubled life ; such a life, now, as your 


88 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


cousin Mary Brown lives, with her regular house 
duties, and her books, and her garden to look 
after, and her dairy, and her old and infirm people 
to see to and to look up to her as a Lady Boun- 
tiful. Ah, it is a Paradise lost to me. I have 
always longed for such a life. It is my envy." 

I was astonished at this outburst. The speaker’s 
tones left me in no doubt as to her sincerity. 

But why," I asked, “ should you not lead such 
a life if you desire it ?" 

“ Ah," she said, “ you cannot understand. One 
must be born to it. I have always been in trouble 
since I married. My father meant it for the best. 
He was always in trouble himself, poor man. You 
don’t think any the worse of me for what you 
heard, do you ?" 

“ Why should I ? I heard nothing except that 
you have been the victim of an odious persecution 
And I still regret — " 

“ I know," she said. ** But that message from 
the sea — did it not strike you as a little mysterious ? 
I must give you the credit," she continued in a 
lighter tone, “ of having looked most absolutely 
unconcerned, as if it were the most ordinary thing 
in the world that a lady should receive a letter in 
that way. You could not have looked more 
politely unconscious of anything strange if I had 
received a note from the postman." 

And she could not have spoken in a lighter tone 
if we had been chaffing one another in a drawing- 


SOME CLEVER MANCEUVRING. 89 

room. Her rapid changes of mood were incom- 
prehensible to me, yet they came with such a rush 
that I was carried away with the torrent, naturally 
phlegmatic as I am. 

‘‘After all, Mrs. Ingers,” I said, “to quote your 
own words, what concern was it of mine ?" 

“ But supposing it had been a concern of yours,’' 
she persisted, “ what would you have thought ? 
Would you have thought that I had unusual powers 
of acting upon other minds at a distance ?” 

“I am a plain, prosaic person,” I answered 
gravely, “ and not at all imaginative. If you wish 
really to know, I will confess that I was inclined to 
think that when you put up that red handkerchief, 
you had some reason to believe that Mr. Wood’s 
yacht was somewhere in the neighborhood.” 

She did not take this prosaic suggestion by any 
means amiss ; on the contrary, she laughed at it 
heartily. When her mirth had subsided, she asked 
me whether I had seen any of the publications of 
the Psychical Research Society. 

I said I had not, and thereupon she offered to 
lend me a volume which contained, she said, some 
very curious facts. “ I am not at all a clever per- 
son myself,” she said ; “but I should like to know 
what a really able man thinks of them.” 

This was tolerably strong flattery, but I confess 
that I was so pleased with my companion that I 
swallowed it with something like delight. I con- 
sidered it necessary, however, to maintain my 


90 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


character as a hard-headed person, not easily im- 
posed upon, so I remarked that perhaps I should 
explain the facts by denying them to be facts. 

Oh, but they are thoroughly well authenti- 
cated,” she said. 

We had reached the porch of Garacraig House 
by this time. “ Come in and see,” she said. 

We went in, and she submitted several cases to 
me from the precious volumes. She seemed to 
have them at her fingers’ ends. It was evidently 
a favorite study with her. I observed the signa- 
ture of “ G. S. Wood,” on the cover of one of the 
books. 


A MIDNIGHT VISITOR. 


91 


CHAPTER VIII. 

A MIDNIGHT VISITOR. 

How long we remained over this to me inter- 
esting comparison of ideas I do not know. I did 
not look at my watch when we went in, nor did I 
look at it before I came out. All I know is that 
it was thick dusk when we went in, and that when 
I came out it was so dark among the trees that at 
first I could hardly distinguish the road, and felt 
my way by the crunching of the gravel under my 
feet. 

There were three ways back to the Manse. I 
chose the longest. Mrs. Ingers was the most in- 
teresting woman I had ever met. The meditative 
mood in which I had sought the shore had given 
place to another, equally absorbing, but much 
more tumultuous. I crunched along the gravelled 
drive under the trees in a state of foolish, indefinite 
excitement, my brain stirred as it had never been 
before by a throng of new and wonderful experi- 
ences. I felt like a traveller over the sea of life 
who had landed on a strange shore, and had spent 
the day in explorations, every step of which had 
brought fresh marvels before his eyes. Amidst 
so much that was new and strange and perplexing 


92 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


my mind could not fasten upon any one particular ; 
but the combined effect of all was a turbulent ele- 
vation of spirit. When I came out from among 
the trees into the open, I cast my eyes freely over 
the darkened land and up to the pale blue sky, 
with its dim stars, full of vague exultation, as one 
who had obtained a new experience of the richness 
and fulness of life. And before my mental vision 
ever kept flashing with singular distinctness the 
face of Mrs. Ingers in some one of its many changes. 
I could not fix it in one aspect ; but one after 
another flashed upon me vividly and went ; and I 
heard in the same involuntary fashion tone after 
tone of her thrilling voice in its swift transitions 
from grief to gayety. There was a strange sense of 
something witch-like in these rapid mental trans' 
formations of the sprightly dame : she was as the 
sybil who had conducted me through new regions 
of spiritual experience. 

I must have been very much preoccupied, for I 
had walked nearly a mile before I became aware 
of a vague want which ultimately culminated in 
the discovery that I was not smoking. Here was 
an earthy descent from the heights to which I had 
been transported, a sudden, plump, sobering fall. 
I put my hand in the pocket of my ulster to feel 
for my pipe. It was not there. Mechanically I 
felt in another pocket, nothing doubting that I 
should put my hand upon it. It was not there 
either, and I stood in some alarm and made a 


A MIDNIGHT VISITOR. 93 

rapid and thorough search. It was not upon my 
person at all. 

Nobody but a smoker can understand my con- 
sternation. Not only was it a favorite pipe, but 
it was the only pipe I had brought to the country 
with me. I should be thrown back upon the local 
clays, and should have to wait some time before I 
could get one of them. 

Of course I reflected upon the folly and absur- 
dity of being so dependent on a dirty habit. I 
did not spare my own weakness, you may be sure, 
and read myself a lecture against the petty vice 
that the most violent anti-tobacconist could not 
have improved upon. I even resolved to take 
this as a warning and an opportunity, and from 
that moment to shake myself free from the de- 
grading servitude. 

But I had not walked many steps in the full 
strength of this resolution, when all of a sudden 
I remembered what I had done with the missing 
briar. I had put it away in the porch of Gara- 
craig House as I entered. I remembered deposit- 
ing it in a flower-pot, and amusing myself at the 
time with a little quip 'that came into my head 
that flowers love the weed. 

And remembering what I had done with it, I 
thought I might as well recover it. I would prove 
my strength of will by not smoking it, but I would 
recover it. This would be much more meritorious 
than merely not smoking because I had nothing 


94 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


to smoke. To have the pipe and not to smoke it 
would be a veritable triumph of will over inclina- 
tion. I had no desire to go indoors yet. I knew 
that my uncle never went to bed till twelve at the 
earliest, so that I would have no difficulty in get- 
ting into the Manse. Out in the open under an 
unclouded sky there was just light enough for me 
with careful peering, to make out the hands of my 
watch : it was close on eleven. 

There were, as I have said, three ways from 
Garacraig to the Manse. One was the gravelled 
drive and the turnpike by which I had come, a 
distance of a mile and a half. A path through the 
glen of the Garvalt Water, included in the pleasure 
grounds of the house, cut off half a mile. I was 
now near the point where the turnpike crossed the 
glen, and I could go back that way. And once I 
had secured my pipe, there was a still nearer way 
to the Manse — round by the back of Garacraig 
House, through a plantation which covered the 
stables and farm-buildings, and across a field. I 
could easily be at the Manse by this way long be- 
fore twelve. Had I been in a less elevated state 
of mind I should have hesitated to go through the 
dark glen. But in my present mood I had no 
fear of any hostile shape of ghostly or fleshly sub- 
stance that might lie in wait behind corners or in 
dark recesses. There was a time when the glen 
was full of such monsters for me after dark, and 
I was a little astonished and very much pleased at 


A MIDNIGHT VISITOR. 


95 


my own boldness now. I climbed the wall with a 
light heart, and plunged fearlessly into the thick 
gloom, the rush of the water filling the air with 
confident music, where once it had distracted my 
ears with vague terrors. 

I executed the first part of my purpose easily, 
keeping cautiously on the grass till I reached the 
porch, and making as little noise as I could, lest 
the inmates of the house should not have gone to 
bed. In order to get round to the back of the 
house, I had now to turn a corner and pass the 
window of the parlor where Mrs. Ingers had re- 
ceived me. This window looked out upon a lawn 
over which I could tread noiselessly enough, but 
there was a bit of the drive to be traversed before 
I turned the corner, and over this it would not be 
easy to keep my footsteps from being audible. 
Therefore I cautiously coasted the grass on the 
off-side of the drive, meaning to come within sight 
of the window before I ventured to set foot on 
the treacherous gravel. I thought I might be 
able to cross it a little distance off without mak- 
ing noise enough to attract attention. 

Yes; there was light in the parlor. A belt of 
light from the window streamed across the lawn, 
caught a hedge of shrubs a few yards off, and 
went searching through the trees beyond. Only 
for a moment, however, did my eyes follow its 
course, looking automatically for a spot where it 
might be crossed with safety. Only for a moment 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


96 

did my eyes take this direction, in obedience to 
the idea that was in my head when I turned the 
corner. In another instant they were fixed on a 
figure that stood right in the light in front of the 
window, and seemed from its attitude to be reach- 
ing forward to tap on the glass. 

Presently I heard the tapping begin, and imme- 
diately after a suppressed scream. 

It was undoubtedly the convict ; I at once rec- 
ognized the scarecrow dress and the big figure, 
looking still larger in the belt of light that 
streamed from the window, and throwing a huge 
shadow behind him on the green sward. My 
heart beat fast as I grasped my stick firmly and 
prepared to advance stealthily on him from behind. 

“ Don’t be frightened, Lorry,” I heard him say ; 
“ it’s only me, Arthur Roper.” 

What she said in answer I did not hear ; but as 
I crossed the gravel with extremest caution, tak- 
ing care to move each step as he was in the act 
of speaking, I heard him pleading with her and 
apparently receiving rebuff after rebuff. 

I want you to help me, of course.” 

“ Oh yes, you promised me money. To-mor. 
row at two ; I have not forgotten.” 

I want clothes ; I can’t go far in these togs.” 

“ There must be some of Ingers’s in the house.” 

Don’t be hard on a fellow, Lorry; I’m in a 
devil of a scrape.” 


A MIDNIGHT VISITOR. 97 

“ Fm your cousin after all, and we were once 
good friends.” 

‘‘ Oh yes ; but I can explain all that. You were 
in a dreadful wax this afternoon, and wouldn’t 
hear me.” 

“ Open the window, and I’ll clear all that up.” 

No ; I won’t go away, hot till you have heard 
me. Where am I to go to ?” 

“ No ; you won’t raise the house.” 

** All right, do. I can’t be worse than I am.” 

He rather raised his voice as he said this, and 
the window was hurriedly opened. It was a 
French window, opening on to the lawn. 

He made a step forward, and put one foot on 
the sill, but drew back with an oath. I could see 
the clear barrel of a revolver gleaming in the 
light ; he had almost touched it. 

“ Will you go away now, you miserable cow- 
ard?” I could not see her face, her back being to 
the light ; but her attitude, as she stood in the 
window, was firm and commanding. “ Do you 
think to bully me ? Go away, or I will shoor you 
like a dog, and end this persecution.” 

She spoke in a low, distinct voice. 

Shoot,” he answered sullenly. ** As well be 
shot as hanged. It would be rather a lark to be 
shot by you.” 

For a moment she looked as if she would do it. 
Then she relented, or her curiosity got the better 
of her, and she said : 


98 


A GRASS WIEOW. 


‘‘ You spoke of explaining your infamous con- 
duct. How can you do that ?” 

It was not my doing ; it was the lawyer fel- 
low’s — him who defended me at the trial — en- 
tirely his idea. He said it was the only way to get 
me off. You were the only other person that 
could have altered the figures on the check. If 
you didn’t do it it must have been me, and the 
lawyer hinted that it was you accordingly.” 

“ But why did you let him } Why did you not 
speak out yourself ?” 

“ I thought you couldn’t be punished for alter- 
ing a cheque drawn by your husband.” 

“ Did the lawyer tell you this too ?” 

Well, he never said you could. You are a 
oner to cross-examine, Lorry. Don’t be hard on 
a poor fellow. Of course I did my best to get 
off. It was only natural, and I’ve suffered for it.” 

“ And was the other thing the lawyer’s inven- 
tion ?” 

“ What do you mean ?” 

“You know — that there had been something 
between us.” 

“ That was none of my doing.” 

“ You swear that ?” 

“My Bible oath on it. That was his idea, 
every bit, and I took nothing by it, blast him, but 
an extra couple of years, for the Beak was down 
on me hard for trying to spoil your character.” 

Mrs. Ingers seemed to be impressed by what 


A MIDNIGHT VISITOR. 


99 


he had said, for she lowered her revolver, and 
stood for a minute or two in a thoughtful posture 
with her left hand raised to her chin. Then she 
spoke. 

“ What is it that you want me to do now ? I 
have promised to give you money to-morrow. I 
will do so. But it is not here. I will send for it 
in the morning ; what more do you want ?” 

“ I want to know what’s up between you and 
that yacht. I saw your flag, and I saw you get a 
letter.” 

She turned upon him angrily and raised her 
revolver again. “ Understand me,” she said. “ I 
have listened to you about yourself, but I will 
have no meddling with my affairs. Begin any- 
thing of the kind again and you go ; if you don’t, 
I will defend myself with this.” 

The rufflan was cowed, and no wonder, for 
there was a dangerous frenzy in her voice, and I 
expected every instant that her excitement would 
pass beyond her control. I heard Roper mutter 
in a grumbling tone : 

“ Easy, easy. Easy does it. You needn’t be 
so waxy.” 

What more do you want, then ?” 

“ I want some of Ingers’s togs. I can’t get off 
in this sort of rig.” 

“ Why do you use that hateful prison slang?” 
she said, with a feminine impatience of art odious 
trifle so odd in the circumstances that, serious as 


100 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


the situation was, I could not keep from smiling 
at it. Have you sunk so low as to have forgot- 
ten the language of a gentleman ?” 

“ It may come back with the clothes,” he mut- 
tered sulkily. 

“ Wait here, then, till I see what I can get.” 

I could not be mistaken ; there was actually a 
trace of amusement in her voice. She added in 
sterner tones, 

“ Don’t dare enter till I come back.” 

“You may as well give me a razor if you can 
find one,” were the impudent rascal’s last words 
as she shut the window. 

While this dialogue was in progress I had con- 
trived to cross the gravel walk. After the way 
in which she had checked my attempts at inter- 
ference in the afternoon, I considered it wise to 
keep in the background ; but I held myself ready 
to rush forward on the slightest sign that she 
needed my assistance. It was so dark among the 
trees that I ran no risk of being seen by them, 
more particularly as they were standing in the 
light, but for better security I availed myself of 
the shelter of a yew tree which stood within a 
dozen yards or so of the window. 

I kept my station after Mrs. Ingershad gone in, 
resolved to see him safely away from the house. 
In about ten minutes she returned, and handed 
him what looked like a Gladstone bag. “ It is a 
bag of my husband’s,” she said, “which came 


A MIDNIGHT VISITOR. 


lOI 


among my things by mistake. You will find there 
what you want.” 

This matter-of-fact statement was such a change 
from the tragic strain of a few minutes before that 
again I was inclined to laugh, and my risibility 
was increased when the ruffian shouldered the 
bag with the remark : 

“ Thanks very much, Lorry ; I shall travel now 
like a mob.” 

The comic incongruity of the strangely mixed 
scene continued to haunt me as I hurried home 
to the Manse by the shortest cut. 

I may add here that what I had heard at the 
window induced me after I returned to London 
to hunt up the report of Roper’s trial in the file 
of the local newspaper preserved in the British 
Museum. It was tolerably plain what his offence 
had been, but it may satisfy the curiosity of 
others, as it satisfied mine, to know some of the 
circumstances. 

The charge against Roper was forging or uttering, 
knowing to have been forged, two cheques drawn 
by Mr. Ingers. The cheques were drawn to self 
or bearer,” and had been given to Mrs. Ingers for 
her personal expenses. The amount was originally 
(eight pounds); but a cipher had been added 
to the 8 and a ^ to the eight before the cheques 
were presented at the bank. 

Roper, who was admitted to have presented 
the cheques, was charged with the forgery. His 


102 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


defence was that he had received the cheques as 
he presented them from Mrs. Ingers. The lady 
was put into the witness-box, and fiercely and re. 
lentlessly examined by Roper’s counsel in support 
of this contention. The examination was reported 
in full ; it had evidently been a sensational case, 
and will no doubt still be remembered by many 
who read this. She was asked if Roper was her 
cousin ; if she had known him before her mar- 
riage ; if she had continued the intimate acquaint- 
ance after marriage ; if he had often been in the 
house during her husband’s absence ; if she had 
ever given him money before the two cheques to 
help him out of his difficulties ; if she had begged 
her husband not to prosecute him. Mrs. Ingers 
had admitted all this. The vile insinuation was 
obvious, and the judge had interfered, and put a 
direct question to the lady, to which she had 
given an indignant denial. Evidently her de- 
meanor in the witness-box had made a most fav- 
orable impression. I heard Roper say that he had 
gained nothing by his line of defence. This was 
quite true : the judge, in summing up, had char- 
acterized it as infamous, and in all probability it 
had increased, as Roper believed, the severity of 
the sentence. 


A COMPROMISING SITUATION. 


103 


CHAPTER IX. 

A COMPROMISING SITUATION. 

Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I 
walked across to the doctor’s for the newspaper, 
and read the latest news about the chase of the 
convict to my aunt and Mary, not without a cer- 
tain secret sense of superiority in virtue of my 
more recent knowledge of his movements. 

They had heard from my uncle about the late- 
ness of my return, and I had had to bear a good 
deal of chaff from Mary as to the profundity and 
extent and probable result of the portentous 
think ” in which I had engaged by the lonely 
sea. Mary was a well-read girl, and she reminded 
me of the lonely meditations and high resolves of 
Warren Hastings when he was a boy, and told me 
that if this tremendous “ think” of mine did not 
lead to my becoming at least Governor-General of 
India she would consider it had been entirely 
wasted, or at least that the deliberation and the 
result were utterly disproportionate. I bore her 
chaff with great good humor, and replied as well 
as I could ; and finding myself tormented by a 
desire to tell her what I had really been doing, 
raised the question for her which of two things 


104 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


gives the greatest pleasure, to know a secret or to 
tell a secret. Mary answered at once that to 
know a secret without being able to tell must be 
a very barren satisfaction, or even a positive pain, 
unless you can torture other people by giving 
them to understand that you know but will not 
tell. Even in that case you lay yourself open to 
the annoyance of being taunted with only pre- 
tending to know, a taunt which you can meet 
only by telling. All which looked as if the ad- 
vantage lay with telling a secret ; but I argued, 
on the other hand, that once you part with your 
secret you part with your sense of superiority over 
other people. 

“All this,” said Mary, “looks very profound, my 
dear George, but it only means that when you 
have eaten your cake you part with your sense of 
superiority in having a cake to eat. All the same, 
there is an undeniable pleasure in eating a cake ; 
so if you have a secret to tell, George, out with 
it.” 

I have always admired Mary’s cleverness, and 
never began a discussion with her without finding 
to my cost that I had a much slower and more 
creeping intellect. It would have taken me hours 
to work out that parallel between the cake and 
the secret, let alone the practical application. 

Of course I protested that I had raised the 
question a propos of nothing in particular ; but I 
could see that she was sceptical. 


A COMPROMISING SITUATION. 10$ 

Her scepticism grew to acute suspicion when a 
few minutes afterwards the housemaid announced 
that there was a groom from Garacraig House at 
the door with a message for me. 

I tried hard to take this as a matter of course, 
but I fear not with entire success. My cousin 
raised her hands in open and undisguised wonder. 

“ Are you sure there is no mistake?” she asked 
of the housemaid. “ Are you sure the man did 
not mean my father ? There are two Mr. Browns 
in the house, you know.” 

“ He said young Mr. Brown from London, 
please ma’am,” returned the maid. 

“ Well, that was clear enough. This is rather 
suspicious, my young man,” she added, turning 
to me. “ Of course it is h propos of nothing in 
particular.” 

I gave a grin which I meant to be tantalizing, 
but which may have been a little embarrassed, 
and hurried out. 

The groom had come with a letter, which he 
had been instructed to deliver into my own hands. 
It ran as follows : — 

“ Dear Mr. Brown, 

Can you look in at Garacraig in the course of 
the day? I forgot to draw yourattention to quite 
the most interesting case of all. 

“Yours very truly, 

“ Laura Ingers.” 


Io6 A GRASS WIDOW. 

“What a woman ! ” I exclaimed to myself ad- 
miringly, when I had read this. “ Last night 
brought to bay by a ruffian and prepared to defend 
herself with a revolver, and this morning prepared 
to discuss ghosts, dreams, presentiments, and so 
forth, as eagerly, no doubt, as if such questions 
were her wildest excitement.” 

I decided to start off at once. To tell the 
truth, I was afraid to encounter again the cross- 
examination of my mercilessly inquisitive cousin. 
But just as I was taking my walking-stick out of 
the umbrella-stand she darted out upon me. 

“Well, George, what, is it? What does she 
want ? ” 

“ Oh, nothing particular,” I answered carelessly ; 
“ only spooks.” 

“What’s spooks? ” 

“ Spooks,” I answered solemnly, “ is a scientific 
word derived from the Greek, and signifies 
spirits.” 

“ But isn’t it rather too early in the day for that 
sort of thing ? ’^’ 

I laughed mysteriously. 

“You don’t mean to say that she has sent a 
special message to you upon such slight acquaint- 
ance to ask you to drop in for a friendly glass be- 
fore midday ?” 

I laughed again. 

“ George,” she cried impatiently, “ what do you 


A COMPROMISING SITUATION. 


107 


mean? Do you mean to insinuate with your 
spooks that Mrs. Ingers drinks ?” 

I hastened to explain that I meant another 
kind of spirit — disembodied spirits, separable 
souls, ghosts, gobblins, and suchlike. 

“ And what does she want you to do with her 
spooks, as you call them? Does she keep a 
menagerie of them? Have they mutinied? If 
they have, I should have thought my father would 
have seemed a more likely person to put them 
down.” 

“ I may as well show you her letter,” I said 
thoughtlessly. My mind was full of the convict, 
as the point in my relations with Mrs. Ingers that 
had to be kept dark ; and as the note said noth- 
ing about him, I thought there could be no harm 
in showing it, and at the same time the action 
would look frank and open, and would disarm 
suspicion. 

But the moment I saw her face lighting up, 
as she bent it over the letter, I felt that I had 
acted hastily, and without due consideration of 
the diabolical perspicacity of women. 

Mary read the letter aloud slowly, with special 
emphasis on the words “ / forgot to draw your at- 
tention and when she had done she raised her 
eyes and her eyebrows, and said, “ When did you 
have this conversation with Mrs. Ingers about 
spooks ? It was not in my presence.” 

“ Oh, the other day,” I said ; and fled, leaving 


io8 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


behind me an explanation that I would tell her 
all about it at lunch, and must go at once, in or- 
der to be back in time. 

As I shut the garden gate I could hear her pur- 
suing me with the remark that evidently the pub- 
lic service was not favorable to the practice of 
straightforward truth. 

Mrs. Ingers received me with a glad and eager 
welcome, as if I were an old friend opportunely 
arriving in a moment of difficulty. So you got 
my note !” she said. “ I am so glad you have 
come. I want very much to see you.” 

I was so put off my balance by this reception 
that I hardly knew what to say. I believe I mut- 
tered something about her sending for me being 
an honor. 

“ Well, let us proceed to business,” she said 
cheerfully, turning her chair round from an escri- 
toire at which she had been busy with her corre- 
spondence. There was an assumption of a lawyer- 
like air in the words and gesture that tickled me. 
I was soon to be reduced to a graver frame of 
mind. 

“ One moment,” I said. ‘‘ Pray understand that 
I know so little about psychical research that I 
am not really worthy of being consulted on any- 
thing connected with the subject.” 

Her brows knit for an instant, as if she did not 
comprehend what I was referring to. Then she 


A COMPROMISING SITUATION. IO9 

broke into the catching laugh of involuntary mirth 
that I had observed before when she was detected 
in a little artifice. 

“ Oh yes/’ she said, “ my letter. I put that in 
my letter lest your cousin should make you show 
it to her. But of course I am not so deeply in- 
terested in psychical research as all that.” 

Soon her expression changed, and she said in 
an earnest voice, and with a searching, half-dis- 
trustful look, “You volunteered yesterday to do 
me a service if I wanted it. I do want help 
now, sorely.” 

I did not remember making a distinct offer of 
service, but I had certainly felt like it, and I said 
at once, “ Anything that I can do I will do most 
gladly.” 

“ Wait till you hear what it is,” she said, with a 
sad smile, still looking at me dubiously, though 
apparently please 1 with my earnestness. 

“ I think I can guess,” I answered impetuously 
“ You want me to help you in getting rid of the 
persecution of that man Roper, the convict.” 

She started, and as she took her arm off the 
escritoire to lean forward towards me I saw that 
it trembled. “ What made you think of that ?” 
she asked, and waited for an answer with lips a 
little parted and brows slightly contracted. 

“ I heard what passed between you last night,” 
I said frankly, wishing to save her the trouble of 
explanation, 


10 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


“ Yesterday afternoon, you mean. But I un- 
derstood you to say that you did not hear much.” 
She looked at me suspiciously. 

“ I mean last night,” I answered ; “ here, on the 
lawn outside, at this window.” She started to 
her feet in indignant surprise. In a moment I 
saw, though too late, that I had made a mistake. 

I was so full of the conviction that she had been 
wronged and was being persecuted that I had 
forgotten how I obtained my knowledge. 

“ This is very strange, Mr. Brown,” she said, 
when at last she found words, with difficulty com- 
manding her voice. “ It seems that you have 
been dogging me — shadowing me, I think the 
phrase is, playing the eavesdropper. To what do 
I owe this strange attention ? Was it purely dis- 
interested curiosity, or are you employed to do 
it? And you looked so artless and honest too !” 

Had I been perfectly cool and collected I might , 
have put a sinister construction upon this quick 
fear of espionage as implying that there was 
something to hide. But in the ardor of my 
championship I only took it as another proof of 
the injustice to which the unfortunate woman had 
been subjected. Her wrongs had made her sus- 
picious. 

“ Believe me,” I said, rising and making a step 
towards her as she sat at the escritoire with her 
chin resting on her hand, “ believe me it was 
purely accidental.” And I explained how I had 


A COMPROMISING SITUATION. 


Ill 


gone out on the first occasion without the slight- 
est expectation of finding her by the shore, and 
how I had come back on the second occasion 
thinking that at the utmost I should see nothing 
but the light from her window, and taking every 
precaution to avoid disturbing her. 

“ It is a very plausible story,” she said, after 
listening to my explanation in silence ; “ but how 
am I to believe it ?” 

Her tone was less cutting than before, and this 
hopeful sign that I might be able to put myself 
right with her betrayed me into another confes- 
sion, which I now see to have been precipitate 
and ill-judged. 

I can only give you my word of honor,” I 
said ; “ and as the strongest proof of my sincerity 
I will confess that I did come down here with 
some thought of playing the spy upon you in a 
sort of way.” 

I smiled as I said this. “ Indeed !” she said, in 
a tone of bitter resignation. “ How was that ? 
But,” she added haughtily, again rising to her 
feet, “ I have no right to your confidence, and do 
not desire it.” 

I felt humiliated, and more anxious than before 
to put myself right. She looked superb as she 
stood there at her full height, her queenly features 
full of cold defiance. I thought of the courage 
with which she had overawed her midnight visitor. 

“ You may not desire it,” I said, with abject 


II2 


A GRASS WIDOW* 


earnestness ; but you have every right to my con- 
fidence, and to an apology also, for I did you 
wrong, and it would ease my conscience to make 
confession.” 

“ Proceed with it,” she. said, “ since you wish it.” 

“ Well, then,” I plunged on, “ I happened a fort- 
night ago to hear of a lady so fascinating and so 
fond of conquest over men’s hearts that she 
would be certain to make a commotion wherever 
she went. I had some reason to suspect that this 
might be the lady who had taken Garacraig 
House, and this was partly the reason why I came 
here.” 

She smiled bitterly. Still, it was a smile. She 
walked to the window and looked out. Finding 
that I did not go on, she turned and said in a 
somewhat contemptuous tone, “ Is that all ? Sure- 
ly your explanation is rather lame, Mr, Brown ! 
I do not quite see as yet what was your object in 
coming. Did you wish to submit your noble self 
to this fascinating person and defy her to make 
an impression on you ?” 

“ Oh no,” I said, “ I have no pretensions to 
being worthy of such an experiment.” 

Then, what was your object ?” 

I was fairly cornered. I could not have given a 
very clear account of my object ’to myself ; how 
then could I express it to her ? And yet I had 
floundered like a fool into confessing that I had 


A COMPROMISING SITUATION. II3 

some purpose in coming after her. I blushed 
violently, and plunged and stammered on — 

“ The person who mentioned this lady to me was 
talking of books and the strange things to be found 
in them, and he said that stranger things were to 
be found in real life, and that novelists had only 
to use their faculties of observation — ” 

At this she laughed outright. Ah, I see now. 
You were stalking me to put me into a book. 
Well, do I come up to your expectations ? I 
thought you scribblers spun everything out of 
your beads. But I am very glad if I can save you 
the trouble of invention.” 

“ Mrs. Ingers,” I protested, “ I had no such idea 
in my head. When I spoke of playing the spy, I 
did not mean spying upon you in a literal sense. It 
was more to humor your phrase that I repeated it 
than because it described accurately anything that 
was in my own thoughts.” 

“ "Bhen what was in your thoughts ?” 

“ Only a vague curiosity to be on the spot where 
tHis- fascinating woman was to exercise her charms, 
near the scene of the — the — ” 

Tragedy,” she suggested, with another scorn- 
ful laugh. 

“ Tragedy or comedy,” I said hurriedly ; “ I had 
no very clear idea, though you look more like a 
tragic heroine now. But I had not been half-an 
hour in your company when I despised myself for 


114 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


my impertinence, and now I find my apish curios- 
ity changed into the profoundest pity.” 

“ Pity?” she echoed, flashing up again. I am 
much obliged to you, Mr. Brown,” 

‘‘ No, no,” I cried, losing my temper a little at 
her perversity, “ not pity. I seem always to stum- 
ble on the wrong word. Not pity. Say rather 
sorrow, infinite sorrow, that so divine a creature, 
whose progress through the world ought to be a 
continuous triumph, should be harassed and 
dragged down be an odious and vulgar persecution, 
should be blackmailed by a convict. I feel the 
iniquity and enormity of this, and would give 
worlds to be the means of putting a stop to it.” 

I spoke vehemently, and I could see her color 
come and go under my words. She turned away 
and looked out of the window. 

Presently she faced me again and said, Who 
would have thought you. had so much fire ?” She 
tried to speak in a light and jesting tone, but I 
could see her lips quiver. 

“ Believe me, Mrs. Ingers,” I continued sol- 
emnly, “ I had no thought of playing the spy 
when I heard what I did hear. But I heard noth- 
ing that was not to your honor.” 

She looked steadily at me and tried to say some- 
thing in reply, but her voice choked, and after 
trying in vain for a moment to command it she 
sunk upon an ottoman, covered her face with her 
hands, and wept bitterly. 


A COMPROMISING SITUATION. II5 

“You are too good,” she sobbed. “You are a 
poet, and see things as they ought to be, not as 
they are. I am not the heroine that you fancy. 

0 that I were ! O that I had my life to live over 
again !” 

“ Mrs. Ingers,^’ I said respectfully, touched by 
her ardent anguish, “ you do yourself injustice.” 
It was the second time I had made this protest. 

“ Don’t !” cried. “ O pray don’t, don’t speak 
in that way ' I cannot bear it !” And she sobbed 
more convulsively than before. 

I did not know what to say or what to do. I 
paced the room in intolerable perplexity. “ I 
wish,” I cried, “that I could do anything to rid 
you of this disgusting fellow. I am certain he is 
at the bottom of it. I wish could rid you of 
him.” 

She did not answer at first, but after a time she 
became more composed, and asked, ‘ How?” 

“ Give him up to the police,” I said impatiently ; 
but the words were hardly out of my mouth when 

1 felt that however practical this course might be 
it was hardly in keeping with the heroic key in 
which I had felt and spoken a moment before. 

“ But I don’t want to give him up to the police,” 
she murmured, and again her tears fell fast and 
she bewailed her lot. 

I was a little staggered at this. “ Why not ?” 
I asked. 

“ I could not do it without compromising my* 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


1 16 

self,” she said. She began to smile through her 
tears, and, with another sudden change of mood, 
arose and wiped her eyes, turning her back on me 
the meanwhile. “You see,” she said, “ I am not 
at all the tragic heroine you supposed. I am but 
a poor, weak woman, with all a weak woman’s 
little fears and scruples.” 

“ But what is there to prevent me from telling 
the police where the man is ? He must be some- 
where in the neighborhood, unless ” — It occured 
to me that possibly he might have obtained the 
means of escape from her and be now at a dis- 
tance, but I hesitated to say this to her. 

“ I know where he is,” she said presently ; “ but 
what you suggest can’t be done.” She shook her 
head decisively. “ I may as well tell you,” she 
said at at last, with a smile, “ I was weak enough 
last night to give him an old suit of my husband’s 
which happened to have been sent down here, and 
if he is taken he must be taken in that. I did not 
think of that at first ; in fact, I thought of it only 
just before I sent for you.” 

I suddenly remembered that she had said when 
I came in, that she wanted me to do her a service. 
What could it be ? I reminded her of the fact, 
and put the question to her.” 

“ It is a very singular request that I am to 
make,” she answered, “ as you will probably think 
when you hear it.” She hesitated for a moment, 
and then continued, with just a shade of embar- 


A COMPROMISING SITUATION. II7 

rassment in her voice. “ I promised to take him 
some money to-day in the old churchyard. But 
I find that I cannot go there. That is to say, I 
am afraid to go. I don’t know what advantage 
he might take of my being alone.” 

There was a significant pause. The unspoken 
request was pretty plainly indicated. I confess I 
was a little started at the idea of becoming a 
purse-bearer to a convict, who had struck me as 
being a specially brutal and unscrupulous ruffian. 
Much as I admired Mrs. Ingers, such a mission 
fell upon my ardor with a sudden chill. It was 
obviously her wish that I should take the money 
to him, but to gain time for reflection I pretended 
to think that what she wanted was an escort. It 
was rather a mean pretence on my part, and I was 
ashamed of it even at the moment ; but I was so 
taken aback at being asked to assist directly in 
the escape of a felon, who seemed to me to deserve 
the severest punishment, that I took this weak 
course. 

“ It would certainly not be safe for you to go 
alone,” I said. 

“And you are prepared to go with me ?” 

“ Yes,” I said, though really I am most loath 
to help in saving such a scoundrel from his de- 
serts.” 

“ Thanks,” she said, taking my hand, “ you are 
a true friend. I know, of course, it is not a pleas- 
ant service, but I value it all the more. But it 


ii8 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


would hardly do for us to be seen walking together 
out there again. It would set people talking. 
And I am sure, since you are willing to go with 
me, you will not object to go by yourself.” 

The traces of her recent passion of weeping 
were still about her eyes: I could not refuse her. 

I was in for it. I made a virtue of necessity, 
and agreed with as good a grace as I could. 

“ But how am I to find him ?” I asked. He is 
certain to be in hiding.” 

For this also she was prepared. She gave me a 
whistle which I was to sound three times when I 
reached the churchyard, and he would appear. 

Now that I had agreed to go, she was eager that 
I should set out at once. 

“You must urge him to fly at once,” were her 
parting instructions. “Assure him that he has 
not a moment to lose. They are certain to search 
for him all along the coast.” 


“LOOK there! what is that?’ 


CHAPTER X. 

“ LOOK THERE ! WHAT IS THAT ?” 

I HAD an uncomfortable feeling at the time 
that Mrs. Ingers had not been quite straightfor- 
ward with me ; that she was keeping something 
back. She was particularly flurried when she 
spofce of the police being certain to search the 
links. This recurred to me distinctly afterwards 
when I learned that a note from her had come to 
the police-station that very morning to say that 
the fugitive convict had been seen lurking about 
the churchyard on the links. I state the fact, and 
leave my readers to make their own conjectures. 
When I talked the matter over with Doctor X. 
afterwards, he asked me whether I did not see that 
she sent me with money to the convict because 
she wanted me out of the way to leave the coast 
clear for Mr. Wood. But that was absurd. I 
was not so infatuated with her that I would have 
been likely to dangle about Garacraig House and 
the links on the chance of seeing her. On the 
other hand, I don’t think it could merely have 
been that she sent the message before remember- 
ing that the convict would be caught in her hus- 
band’s clothes, and that this would compromise 


120 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


her ; it would have been so easy for her to say 
that he had stolen the bag from Garacraig House. 
No; I am inclined to think that it was merely 
another example of her impulsive and changeful 
nature : that she sent the information to the police, 
and immediately after repented and relented. 

Certainly, however, if I had known this, I 
should have been much more reluctant to under- 
take her errand ; and as it was, I did not at first 
like the job or the way in which she had almost 
manoeuvred me into it. There was something 
wholly unexpected, mysterious, disconcerting 
about her request that I should help her in keep- 
ing this felon out of the clutches of the law. It 
was a note out of tune — a discord. But when I 
thought of her passionate self-abasement, of her 
longing for a happier life, of her complaint of suf- 
fering and proud rejection of pity, of her splendid 
beauty when she drew herself up, ready to stand 
alone, self-reliant, I felt certain that her motives 
must at least be generous. It must simply be that 
I did not know enough to understand her, and 
that she was too agitated to think of explanations 
which I could not in the circumstances ask for. 
I was not a little proud, too, of having inspired 
her with such confidence that she should ask such 
a service of me upon such slight acquaintance. 
And the man — the convict — it might be, since she 
who had suffered from him was anxious to shield 
him from punishment, was not so bad as he looked. 


“LOOK there! what is that?” 


I2I 


Appearances were decidedly against him ; but it 
might be that he had slipped into crime thought- 
lessly, in some moment of temporary madness — 
that he was a victim of circumstances. Perhaps 
in his younger days he had loved her, and her 
marriage had driven him to despair, and despair 
had led to crime. This would explain much that 
I had overheard ; would explain, too, her linger- 
ing compassion for him, and her desire for his 
escape. 

Yes; this harmonized everything. It was all 
to her credit. She was a true and noble-hearted 
woman, faithful to her early affections. Her 
marriage with Ingers had doubtless been a mar- 
riage of convenience, and this convict who had 
now sunk so low still had a hold upon her in the 
woman’s tender memories of her first love. 

Reconciled thus in a measure to the object of 
my repulsive errand, I began to take a more cheer- 
ful view of it, and even to feel a certain exulta- 
tion, as became a clerk in the Education Office, at 
the prospect of widening my experience by an in- 
terview with an interesting convict — a victim of 
circumstances. Forgetting for a moment Mrs. 
Ingers’s imperative injunction that I should urge 
him to fly at once as soon as the money was in 
his hand, I pleased myself with planning how I 
should extract from him something about his past 
life, and the various steps in his downward career. 

I had reached the links, and was busy with such 


122 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


thoughts, when of a sudden my heart was brought 
into my mouth by the sight of a figure advancing 
from the sea over the sandhills on my left. He 
was a large, shapely man in a suit of checked 
tweed, with knickerbockers and a deerstalker cap, 

Mrs. Ingers had given the convict a suit of her 
husband’s. This must be he. He had grown 
tired of waiting, and had strolled out among the 
sand-dunes to meet her. What cool courage the 
man has thought I to myself, and jrather ad- 
mired the ruffian for it. 

I shaped my course so as to meet him, and had 
to alter it slightly once or twice for that purpose. 
I tried to look as unconcerned as possible, and 
looked about to right and left as if I had no object 
but to take the air or admire the scenery ; but 
there must have been something marked in my 
behavior, for as we drew near I observed that he 
was staring at me intently. This, however, did 
not disabuse me of the idea that he was the con- 
vict ; on the contrary, it rather confirmed me in 
that idea. 

“ Good morning, sir,” I said, stopping and rais- 
ing my hat when he was within a few paces. 

“ Good morning,” he answered rather gruffiy, 
in a voice that plainly said, Who the devil are 
you?” It might have been the hauteur of an 
English gentleman, or the surliness of a convict; 
I judged it to be the latter. 


“LOOK there! what is that?” 


123 


“ May I ask,” I said politely, “if you expect to 
see Mrs. Ingers to-day ?” 

He started, frowned, and pulled vigorously at a 
heavy moustache before answering. “ May I 
ask,” he returned at length, “ what business that 
is of yours?” 

Before the words came I had time for certain 
rapid observations. The hand that he had raised 
to his moustache carried a signet ring. The mous- 
tache was obviously not artificial. I looked at 
his tie and at his breast. His tie was fastened 
with a ring bearing a large cameo, and he wore a 
heavy gold chain. 

I was annoyed at not having seen some of these 
significant things, particularly the moustache, be- 
fore I stopped him. I am afraid I must have been 
rather nervous, for I am a fairly good observer as 
a rule. 

“ I beg your pardon, sir,” I stammered. “ I 
took you for somebody else. Good morning.” 

I walked off with as much dignity as I could. 
When I had gone some thirty or forty yards I 
ventured to look round, and caught him in the 
act of looking round at me. I did not turn again 
till I reached the churchyard, and by that time he 
was about a mile off, and apparently heading for 
Garacraig House. The sea was visible from the 
wall on which I stood. A short distance out lay 
the yacht which had been there the night before. 


124 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


At once it flashed across me who this new 
stranger was: it was Mr. Wood. 

“ It was lucky indeed that Mrs. Ingers did not 
come,” I thought to myse]f, as I proceeded to sum- 
mon the convict from his lurking place. 

Three times I sounded the whistle, and then I 
waited. I expected to see him rise like a ghost 
from one of the tombs, and kept a sharp look-out 
all around me. I began to fear that something 
had gone wrong, that he had already fled, or was 
concealed too far off to hear the signal, or saw me 
and was suspicious of showing himself. I write 
deliberately “ to fear,” for really by this time I was 
so much in the spirit of the thing that I should 
have been disappointed if he had not made his 
appearance. 

I was raising the whistle to my lips to repeat 
the signal and had extended my eyes beyond the 
tombs, when above a grassy hill to the south of 
the churchyard, at the spot where he had disap- 
peared on the previous evening, I saw a close- 
cropped head cautiously elevated. The moment 
it caught my eyes it disappeared again. 

“ All right,” I hallooed. “ Mrs. Ingers. All 
right. Mrs. Ingers.” 

After a few seconds, during which I heard a 
click, the head reappeared, and with a hand rest- 
ing on the grass and the barrel of a pistol levelled 
straight at me. 


'‘LOOK there! what is THAT?’* 12$ 

" All right,” said a gruff voice. " I can hear 
you. You needn’t halloo so loud.’* 

" There is no necessity for you to hold out that 
pistol,” I responded, in a tone hardly more civil 
than his own, for I was not over-pleased with this 
ungracious reception. If he was the victim of 
circumstances, there must have been a bad grain 
in the fellow to give circumstances a chance. 
" That is hardly the way to receive a friend,” I 
added, as he showed no sign of changing his atti- 
tude. " I have brought you some money from 
Mrs. Ingers. Come here and get it.” I took a 
little bag from my pocket and held it out as I 
spoke. 

" How much is there ?” he demanded, with no 
abatement of the gruffness of his voice. 

" I had not the curiosity to ask. I simply bring 
it at Mrs. Inger’s desire. I brought it to oblige 
her, and if you don’t come and get it at once I 
will take it back.” 

“ I’m blest if you do, my pippin,” returned he. 
“You just bring it up here, or I’ll put a bullet 
through your nut in the twinkling of a bedpost. 
The cash is not yours by your own showing. 
Look here, guv’nor,” he continued, in a milder 
tone, “ I don’t want to be uncivil, you know, but 
situated as I am I can’t afford to be too gushing. 
How am I to know who you’ve got concealed 
among those blooming tombs? You may as well 
bring it up here since you have brought it so far.” 


26 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


There was some force in this. It is true one 
may go a mile for love where one would not go a 
yard under compulsion. But the point was not 
worth arguing, certainly not worth being shot for. 
I dropped over the wall, and walking up the 
knoll, tossed the bag to him. 

“ Thank ye, matie,” he said; “thank ye kindly.” 

“ I have a message for you also from Mrs. In- 
gers,” I said. “ It is that you had better make 
all haste from here, because the police are on 
your track.” 

“ Thank ye again. I like saying ‘ thank ye.' 
You haven’t anything about yourself that you 
would like to give to a pal in distress? That 
ticker now would be useful, and I’d send it back 
to you from America when I’d done with it.” 

The fellow's impudence was too much for my 
temper. “ Look here, you scoundrel,” I said, 
“ if you want my watch you must take it.” And 
I really felt as if I could part with my life rather 
than give into him again, his manner was so in- 
solent. 

He looked me up and down with a quizzical 
grin. “ You’re a gamer one than you look. 
You’ve got a bit of pluck in you, though one 
wouldn’t think it to look at you. Do you happen 
to know if I settled the hash of that warder at 
the jail ?” 

“ I believe he is still alive,” I said. 


“LOOK there! what is that?” 127 

“ In that case, mate, you may keep your ticker, 
if you’ve game to fight for it. Keep it as a 
souvenir, as a consideration for bringing me the 
ready rhino, though I dare say it’s hanging with 
me all the same if I’m nabbed. If I had stiffened 
the warder I might as well have laid you out: 
they hang for one, and they can’t do more for 
two. And now you may as well tell me who you 
are. I like fo know my friends. And why did 
Lorry send you instead of coming herself ?” 

He still lay face downward, extended at full 
length on the grassy slope, just as he had posted 
himself so as to have the best chance of seeing 
the churchyard without being seen. All trace of 
the convict had disappeared from his dress ; he 
was attired in the tweeds of a country gentleman. 
He had provided himself even with a collar and 
shoes from Mr. Ingers’s wardrobe, and by his 
side lay a deer-stalker cap of the same stuff as the 
rest of the suit. 

I don’t know whether it was relief at finding 
that I might keep both life and honor, or simply 
that the fellow’s impudent humor was irresistible, 
but I felt inclined now to enter into conversation 
with him, and get a little deeper, if I could, into 
his criticism of life. 

‘‘Mrs. Ingers,” I said, “sent me because I 
chanced to be at hand. But why does she take 
siich an interest in you ? ” 


128 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


He winked. “Are you one of her spoons? 
Jealous, eh?” 

His manner was most revolting. “ Mrs. In- 
gers,” I said, “ is a lady for whom I have the 
highest respect.” 

“ So say all of us,” he retorted. 

“You were once a gentleman, I understand,” I 
said. 

He nodded, and plucking a stalk of tall grass 
put the end in his mouth, and tried to tickle his 
forehead with the beard of it, kicking his toes on 
the ground at the same time like an idle boy. 

“ Has prison life driven all proper feeling out 
of you ?” 

“ Mostly,” he answered, and continued his occu- 
pation. 

There was no use in getting angry with such a 
shameless villain. Curiosity mastered my disgust. 

“There was something between you and Mrs. 
Ingers at one time, was there not ? ” 

“ We are cousins.” 

“ And you were in love with her, when that 
word,” I. could not help adding, “ had a more 
sacred meaning for you.” 

“ Stow that, mate,” he shouted angrily, hand- 
ling his revolver. “No cheek. I spooned her 
before she married Old Moneybags.” 

“And what about the cheque?” 

“ What do you know about the cheque ? He 
dropped the grass from his mouth, and looked at 


“LOOK there! what is that?” 129 


me hard, but without meeting my eye. “You 
must be very confidential with Lorry before she 
told you about that.” 

“ She did not tell me. I overheard what you 
said at her window last night.” 

He swore horribly. 

“ Why do you use such foul language ?” 

“ None of that !” he roared in reply, starting 
to his feet. “ I won’t have you coming your cant 
over me. If you had been as long in jail as I 
have you would like a little variety in your lingo 
as much as I do. It’s d — d monotonous, and 
you must have freedom in something. They 
can’t tie up your tcwigue, blast them ! They 
would if they could. But look here, guv’nor, you 
were in the room with Lorry last night when she 
cut up so deuced rough on me. I couldn’t un- 
derstand wily she was so skittish.” 

“ You make a mistake. I was not in the room.” 

“ WhtH-e were you, then ? Under the sofy ?” 

“ No, I was outride on the lawn behind you.” 

“ Ah I I see,” he laughed with a horrible, hoarse 
bray, apparently much relieved, “hanging about 
her window. So you’re not in it any more than 
me. Well, I’ll tell you about the cheque,” he 
continued, stretching himself on the grass again. 
“ That was a rum go. You must know that I 
was dreadfully gone on Lorry before she married 
old Ingers, and after too. I used to hang about 
her window just like you.” 


30 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


The recollection seemed to soften his voiee and 
improve his language, which I was glad of. I 
did not consider it worth while to correct his mis- 
take about my relations with Mrs. Ingers, but I 
interrupted him to ask why she married Mr. In- 
gers. 

“ You have never seen Ingers, or you wouldn’t 
ask. Money, of course. He’s a good quarter of 
a century older than her. Do you know how I 
got nabbed the second time? I was walking in 
one of their squares in Edinburgh about a month 
after I got out, without the smallest thought, so 
help me, of harming a fly or prigging a potato, 
when who should I see strutting along, as if the 
place belonged to him, but this Ingers. I could 
not resist it — he looked so d — d consequential. 
So I gave him a hug, and was collared on the 
spot. I’ve always had such beastly luck. Yes, 
collared on the spot by a common bobby. I did 
not even get a run for it. Would you believe it ? 
I never did anything in my life but doctor those 
two cheques and garotte this beastly old Ingers, 
and I’ve now served seven years. I call it beastly 
hard lines, when there are scores of fellows who 
have done twenty times as much and never picked 
a pound of oakum. Oh, I’m sick of it.” 

“ No doubt it’s hard,” I assented; “ but from 
what I overheard I understood that you tried to 
throw the blame of forging those cheques on 
Mrs, Ingers, and rnade infamous insinuations 


“LOOK there! what is that?“ 131 

against her besides. You can’t call that so much 
bad luck as — ” 

He interrupted me. “ Yes, I do ; d — d bad 
luck. It was my lawyer’s idea to get me off, and 
it got me two years more at least.” 

“You don’t mean to say that any respectable 
solicitor invented such a line of defence as that ?” 

“ Well, he put it into my head by his questions. 
A fellow must do something when he’s cornered. 
I thought it would make old Ingers drop the pros- 
ecution. He ought never to have begun it, the 
canting old hypocrite, building a church, and put- 
ting the screw on his wife’s cousin. D — n him ! 
If he were up there now, I’d garotte him again if 
I swung for it.” 

I was sorry to see that prison discipline had not 
softened the ferocity of this interesting victim of 
circumstances. I asked myself whether there was 
something wrong with a system that turned out 
such a discontented, self- commiserating, and mur- 
derous ruffian after seven years’ experience of it. 
Was it not founded on a mistaken principle? 
Should not its aim be reformation rather than 
punishment ? But could such a character be re- 
formed otherwise than by literally making him 
over again ? 

I looked down at the man as he lay there on 
the grass, tossing the little bag I had brought him 
from hand to hand, and chuckling with fierce joy 
over the thought of once again garotting old 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


132 

Ingers. There was no mark of Cai-n upon him 
now that the tweeds of this same old Ingers, which 
sat loosely on his big but lean and hard figure, 
had been substituted for the prison dress. The 
deer-stalker cap concealed the jail-bird hair of the 
head, and he wore a somewhat rough-looking beard 
and moustache. Was the composition of the in- 
ner man beyond human power to change ? 

I roused myself from such thoughts. I felt that 
it would be worse than useless to give utterance 
to them. There was nothing to be gained by an 
interchange of ideas with Roper on the subject. 

“ Where did you get those whiskers ?" I asked 
him abruptly. 

The chinking of the gold and the thinking of 
vengeance on Ingers seemed to have put him in 
high spirits. He looked up with a laugh, much 
less raucous than any sound I had yet heard from 
his jail-bird throat. 

“ A little rough,” he said, “ but well enough at 
a distance or in the dark. They’re home-made 
articles. Look here.” He pulled off the whole 
covering. “ Neatly-mounted goat’s hair on wire. 
This style, three bob and a tanner.” 

“ But where did you find the goat ?” I asked, 
thinking that he had made them for himself. 

“ I didn’t find the goat, you fool,” he retorted. 
“ I got them from a poacher fellow whom I met 
here last night. I must say you are a very oblig- 
ing population here. You have quite set me up 


‘‘LOOK there! what is that?” 


133 

in business. And he tossed his bag of sovereigns 
in the air. 

I am not a very thin-skinned person. At least, 
I don’t think so, and I try not to be. But I con- 
fess I have an objection to talking with a man 
who calls one a fool upon such very slight provo- 
cation as I had given to this cross-grained felon. 
It is not the insult to one’s sell that one minds, 
but the rudeness of the thing, the jolt off the rails' 
as it were, that it gives to a smooth-running con- 
versation. 

I prepared to leave my interesting companion, 
and by way of doing so reminded him of Mrs. 
Ingers’s injunction to him to depart speedily. 

Ah,” he returned, “ so Lorry wants me to hook 
it, does she? Not yet awhile. I’m quite happy 
and comfortable where I am. I have not been so 
well for years.” 

“But,” said I, with difficulty refraining from 
returning him his own uncomplimentary epithet, 

“ the police are certain to search every yard of the 
coast.” 

*' Let them search,” returned he confidently. 

“ That poacher fellow has put me up to the lie of 
the country. They might as well search for a 
mouse. I shall lie low and laugh at them. That 
poacher fellow is the right sort. I’ve got a lovely 
hole not a mile from here. I say, now, couldn’t 
you bring me a bottle or two of wine ? I’ve got 
some scran in the larder, but you might bring us 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


I.H 

something to moisten it. I should like to taste 
fiz again.” And he smacked his lips. 

“ If you stay, you stay at your own risk,” I said. 
“ Good morning.” 

“ Well, it’s not much to ask,” he muttered some- 
what sulkily. “ I’d think nothing of doing as much 
for you. You needn’t be so uppish. You may 
get into a fix yourself some day.” 

I was climbing the churchyard wall when I 
heard this. I could not help laughing. “All 
right,” I returned ; “ when I’m in a fix ” — 

“ I say,” he interrupted, “ you don’t seem half 
a bad sort after all. Would you like to have a 
lark to-night ? If you’d bring a drop of liquor I’d 
give you such a lark as you never had in your life 
before.” 

This rather appealed to me. “ What is it ?” I 
asked. 

“ Only a little game between me and the poach- 
er. You see that grave near where you're stand- 
ing? There was a cove buried there yesterday — 
a quarrier who had tumbled off the rocks and got 
his knowledge-box smashed. We are thinking of 
unearthing him and making a late convict of him. 
Will you come and see the fun?” 

I shuddered at this gruesome invitation, and 
looked at him to see whether he was in jest or in 
earnest. It was obvious that he might have a 
serious purpose, to dress up the quarrier’s corpse 
in his prison dress and lay it somewhere among 


''LOOK there! what IS THAT?” 1 35 

the rocks in the hope that it might be taken for 
his own. I was still wondering at the recklessness 
that could confide such an intention to me, won- 
dering what I had done to invite such confidence 
and wondering whether or not he was chaffing 
me, when, as I looked at him, I observed his 
expression change. 

" Look there,” he shouted, pointing with his, 
arm beyond me, " what’s that ?” 

I looked and saw a curious procession moving 
rapidly towards the churchyard. It looked like a 
line of beaters, twenty or thirty in number, 
stretching across the whole breadth of the links, 
from the billowy sand-dunes by the shore across 
the grassy flats to the verge of the ploughland. 
The figures at the seaward end of the line appear- 
ed and disappeared among the hillocks as they 
advanced, but they advanced with energy. Con- 
spicuous among them by belted tunic and helmet 
were three policemen, one at each end of the line 
and one in the middle. Even at the distance it 
could be seen that some of the party carried guns. 

There was no room for mistaking the signifi- 
cance of this apparition. It was a search-party. 
Roper saw what it meant as soon as myself. 

“Tata,” he called to me, at the same time 
making a gesture of contempt at the approaching 
band. “ Thanks to my friend the poacher, you 
may look till you’re blind, blast you !” 

“ Have a care,” I shouted to him as he turned 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


136 

in a leisurely manner to go, — siding with him, the 
hunted, I don’t know why, perhaps as an involun- 
tary sequel to our last half-hour’s comradeship, — 
“ have a care. Your friend the poacher is walking 
with that mid-most policeman. I could tell his 
gait a mile off, not to mention his otter-skin cap.” 

I shall never forget the tempest of savage oaths 
that he showered against the supposed traitor in 
his impotent rage. 


PURSUER AND PURSUED. 


CHAPTER XI. 

PURSUER AND PURSUED. 

My consternation was almost equal to his own. 
I had entered into this business, step after step, 
with misgiving. Possibly my sense of guilt was 
out of all proportion to the magnitude of my 
offence, for after all I had only brought some 
money to a fugitive convict at the urgent entreaty 
of a woman in distress. Looking back now I 
really cannot see how I could have avoided doing 
it, nor do I feel that I would do otherwise now in 
the same circumstances. Still, aiding and abetting 
the escape of a convict could hardly be defended 
to the common judgment as fitting work for the 
holiday of a public servant. I had an uneasy 
feeling that I might have a difficulty at justifying 
my position ; and when confronted with the near 
prospect of being found out, this uneasy feeling 
grew to a keen and most disturbing sense of guilt. 
As I looked at the rapidly approaching line of the 
search-party, I felt for the moment that I was the 
object of their search as much as my compromis- 
ing acquaintance, and 1 was seized with sudden 
panic. 


tsB 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


My first impulse was a distracted yearning to 
save myself, to run and hide anywhere. 

“ Where is that hole you spoke of?” I shouted 
to the convict. “Quick! Let us get into it.” 
And I put one foot on the churchyard wall ready 
to leap over as soon as I got his answer. 

He continued to swear horribly, only bringing 
the hole and myself within the sweep of his im- 
precations. 

I wrung my hands in distraction ; for a mo- 
ment I felt inclined to echo his strong language 
against my own stupidity in getting into such a 
mess. I turned upon him. 

“ Why did you not go off at once as I told you 
to when I brought you the money? You see 
what you have done now.” 

The gist of his reply, given in language that I 
will not transcribe, was that I was to blame for 
this, that I had kept him there with my jabbering. 

This angered me, and wrath lifted me out my 
ignominious state of panic. 

“ At all events,” I cried, “ you can shift for 
yourself now, you ungrateful scoundrel ! I cast 
you off. I never brought you a penny. I never 
saw you in my life before. I am simply taking a 
walk on the links and a look at the tombstones.” 

And suiting my action to this conception of the 
proper line for me to take in self-preservation, I 
began sauntering with desperately assumed com- 
posure through the churchyard towards the ap- 


PURSUER AND PURSUED. 


139 


preaching search-party, now within a quarter of a 
mile of us. 

I had not reached the opposite wall when I 
heard him clambering after me. I started and 
turned, but I was now strung up to such a pitch 
that I remained perfectly collected. I waited for 
him to come up. I observed that he had pulled 
off his black whiskers and now exhibited a clean- 
shaven face. I was cool enough to reflect that 
he must have secured Ingers’s razors as well as 
his clothes at Garacraig. 

“What’s up now?” I asked coldly. 

“ All right, my pippin,” he said ; “ let’s brazen 
it out together.” And he made a movement to 
take my arm. 

“What do you mean?” I demanded, shaking 
off his hand. “ I have nothing to do with you.” 

“ Oh yes, you have,” he retorted, in a sneering 
tone and with a threatening look in his eyes. “ I 
mean to stick to you. And if you try pn any 
games I have a barker in my pocket which bites 
as well as barks.” And he tapped his pocket 
significantly. 

I stood up and looked at him firmly, with a 
heedful attention to his right hand. I was really 
so mad and reckless at the moment that I would 
have risked being shot rather than give in to him. 

“ Look you here,” he pursued, “ I have had my 
swear out, and can look things square in the face. 
It’s no good my going back to that hole. If the 


140 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


poacher means to give me up, I should only 
be making it easy for him, But it’s just on the 
cards that it is not his game, and he’s joined the 
peelers only to put them off the scent, for that’s 
where he keeps his poaching tools and smuggled 
’baccy and stuff, and he would let himself in if he 
showed it. So I’ll just walk alongside of you till 
we meet them. If he hasn’t blown on me he’ll 
take no notice, even he knows me, and perhaps 
he won’t in this toggery without the headmark of 
his goatee beard. If I see any sign that he has 
blown, then — ” 

He rapped out another of his astounding oaths, 
and added that he was probably a gone coon in 
any case ; and that if he must swing, he might as 
well get full value for his money. 

I said nothing in reply, but he probably de- 
tected some sign of hesitation in my face, for he 
continued his argument impetuously. 

“ Look you here, guv’nor, you seem a good- 
natured sort enough, and it can make no odds to 
you. You’re taking a walk, and I’m simply a 
friend, or — well — if you prefer it, a stranger that 
you’ve picked up in your walk. I look respect- 
able enough, don’t I, in these togs, quite the 
country squire, eh ? Why shouldn’t I be Ingers 
himself? If we walk quietly along and meet 
them as if we had nothing to fear, these boobies 
will touch their hats to us, that is to say, to our 
clothes, as if we were two blooming gentlemen 


PURSUER AND PURSUED. 14I 

enjoying the beauties of nature, and the sea- 
breeze, and the jolly little rabbits. Come now,’' 
he continued, “ it can make no odds to you. I 
wouldn’t harm you for the world, for this I will 
say, that you’ve done the handsome by me up till 
now.” 

The search-party came steadily on ; I could 
hear them shouting excitedly to one another with 
jest and laughter from end to end of the line. It 
was a day to mock my desperate quandary — a 
fine rich-tinted August day, the light broken and 
softened by clouds driven briskly across the sky ; 
the ruffled sea was of an intense blue. One mo- 
ment I took the scene in with superhuman clear- 
ness ; the next moment I made a desperate effort 
to collect myself and come to a sharp decision. 
There was little time to lose. 

‘‘Whether I stay here, or run away, or go to 
meet them,” I said, uttering my thoughts aloud, 
“ I can’t prevent your accompanying me.” 

“ Right you are, old man,” he said, with his 
jarring familiarity, “ and so you had better let us 
stick together sociable like. You were talking to 
me quite friendly a few minutes ago ; we had bet- 
ter keep it up. I have done nothing new since 
then to make you sheer off. So we had much 
better keep it up. It will be safer for both of us.” 

My pride was touched at his reference to my 
safety and the linking of it with his. But it was 
not to be gainsaid ; I had committed myself by 


142 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


bringing him the money. If he was caught in my 
company I could only get out of it by hard lying, 
and this I did not feel equal to. 

“You are right, I dare say,” I said, at length. 

“ Not a doubt of it,” he answered ; “and you’ll 
say so twice over when you see how I can play 
the heavy swell.” 

They were not two hundred yards off when we 
dropped over the wall and made our way at 
ostentatious leisure towards them. 

I must do my companion’s courage the justice 
to say that he was much more at his ease than 
myself. His acting of the heavy swell was con- 
siderably overdone, but probably none the less 
effective on that account with the spectators. His 
points were sufficiently accentuated to tell, and 
the caricature was so comic at times that it 
helped me to keep down my nervous uneasiness, 
and half reconciled me to the impudent scoundrel. 
He strutted along with his jacket thrown back 
and his thumbs in his arm-holes ; his cap cocked 
on one side and pulled down well over his eyes. 
At every few paces he stopped and looked in- 
quiringly at the line of searchers ; with his mouth 
well pursed out, he faced from one end of the line 
to the other, and repeated, “ God bless me ! ” and 
“What is it all about ?” I had no choice but to 
play second fiddle to this elaborate exhibition of 
dignified curiosity. 

Qur course lay naturally towards the middle of 


PURSUER AND PURSUED. I43 

the line, where Sandy Leiper was advancing side 
by side with the parish constable. 

Sandy, of course, knew me; but I observed 
that he eyed my companion very closely. The 
others gave little attention to us ; they stared at 
us a good deal, but it was the stare of vacuous 
curiosity in a district where well-dressed strangers 
are rare. They withdrew their eyes modestly 
when I looked particularly at any of them. They 
trudged on somewhat hilariously, like men with 
an exciting object in view ; our presence seemed 
to stimulate them in the ardor of their chase. 

But Sandy’s glance was scrutinizing and sus- 
picious, and watched him with some alarm, for 
his own sake chiefly, for I saw that my companion 
had marked his shrewd scrutiny, although the 
only effect on him was to make him still more 
exaggerated in his rdle of astonished stranger. 

The last twenty yards between us were dimin- 
ished one by one. The suspense was most in 
tense. Every instant I expected to hear the 
report of a revolver aimed at the suspected 
traitor, and to see the convict running for his life 
over the bents. 

But yard by yard the interval was traversed, 
aud nothing happened. 

I stopped Sandy to ask him, what we so well 
knew, the meaning of the array. He stood up 
with his hands in his pockets, swinging his body 
round from side to side, to watch the search* 


144 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


party as he spoke. They were hurrying on with 
unbroken pace. Perceiving this, Sandy indulged 
in a wink. 

“ You didn’t happen to see the man in any odd 
corner?’’ asked Sandy, with a world of sly mean- 
ing in look and tone. 

Sandy was true after all. That danger was 
past. I breathed more freely, so freely indeed 
that I felt an insane desire to caper and toss my 
cap in the air. 

But what was to be done next? I put the 
question to my uninvited companion. He, with 
his head on one side, his thumbs in his arm-holes, 
and the calves of his legs as far back as the 
muscles permitted, continued to observe the 
search, wheeling right and left with a vigorous 
assumption of brisk curiosity. 

We must lie by them for a time,” he said ; 
‘‘ it would look odd to go on without waiting to 
see whether they nab the fellow. Look over the 
churchyard well, my lads !” he shouted. 

His advice was taken, and we waited at a little 
distance, while a ring was formed round the 
churchyard, and some adventurous spirits climbed 
the wall and made a thorough examination of the 
tombstones. “ Beastly fools !” said Roper to me. 
“ Do they think I have put myself into a coffin 
and buried myself? Get spades, you fools, and 
dig me out.” 

After this they spread themselves out again 


PURSUER AND PURSUED. 14^ 

into a line and moved away southward beating 
the links as before. 

“What are you going to do now?” I asked, 
trying to convey by my tone that our paths 
lienceforward were separate. 

“ Well,” he replied deliberately, “ I feel rather 
peckish. I think I shall toddle up to Lorry’s and 
ask her to give me some lunch. Unless,” he 
added, “ you insist upon carrying me off to lunch 
with you. But — er — weally,” he continued, strik- 
ing an attitude, and speaking as a heavy swell, 
“weally, now I wemembah, I — er — have not the 
honah of knowing — er — where you — er — live, 
’pon my honah.” 

The ghastly buffoon ! Was I never to get rid 
of him ? The success of his last manoeuvre seemed 
to have intoxicated him. 

“ This puts an entirely new complexion upon 
the aspect of affairs,” he said, mouthing his words 
in a pompous manner. “ If I can pass muster 
like this, demmy, I don’t see why I should not 
have a high old time, and travel to foreign climes 
like a blooming aristocrat. Look here, old man, 
I have an idea. I will come and lunch with you, 
and you shall drive me to the station. I’m afraid 
I must leave my traps in the poacher’s smuggling 
ken, but I have no doubt you can lend me a port- 
manteau and a shirt or two. You can have mine 
in exchange.” 

It was most revolting, maddening in fact. I 


146 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


hastened to assure him firmly that I was but a 
guest in my uncle’s house and that I could not 
take him there. 

‘‘All right, old man,” he returned, with easy 
equanimity. “ Don’t apologize. I quite under- 
stand your difficulty. In that case, I will stroll 
up to Garacraig House, and get a bite there. Do 
you go in my direction so far ?” 

How my heart leaped up at this hint of separa- 
tion! I eagerly seized the opening. My most 
direct road did lie with him so far, but I pointed 
vaguely to some fields on the right, and said I 
must take a short cut through them. I pointed 
out his nearest way to him, and was so overjoyed 
that I almost shook hands with him. But I re- 
membered myself in time, and instead expressed 
a severe hope that if he escaped it would be a 
lesson to him. I put it bluntly enough, I dare 
say, for I was in terror lest he should change his 
mind, and fix himself on to me again, and I was 
off the road, through a paling, and on to a turnip- 
field almost before I had finished my few words 
of parting. 

“ Au revoivy' he called after me in a mocking 
tone. 

I did not mind his mockery. Never in my life 
have I experienced such a sense of relief. I 
strode rapidly and recklessly through the turnips 
at right angles to the road, never looking behind 
me. I did not venture to look round till I reached 


PURSUER AND PURSUED. 


147 


the other side of the turnip-field, when I saw him 
strutting along towards Garacraig at his leisure. 
He waved his hand to me, but I did not return 
the salutation. The next field was covered with 
waving green corn. I thought of the irascible 
agriculturist, and his fury against trespassers ; but 
I was reckless. I plunged in and waded through 
with all my might as if the enemy were behind 
me and every step increased the distance between 
us. 

It was three o’clock by the time I reached the 
Manse, and their luncheon hour was half-past one. 
My first duty was to find my aunt, who was a 
somewhat ceremonious person and apologize. 
She sometimes sat, or rather lay, in the drawing- 
room on the first floor ; sometimes in my uncle’s 
study on the ground floor. I tried the study first. 
It was a warm day and my rapid walk had made 
me very hot, and I paused a moment at the door 
to wipe my forehead before entering. When I 
did open the door, I saw— not my aunt, but a 
scene which made me stand and stare, and the 
next moment burst into a fit of uncontrollable 
but somewhat bitter laughter. 

My cousin Mary was seated in an arm-chair, 
usually occupied by my uncle, opposite the desk 
at which he composed his sermons. She held 
some knitting in her hand, and seemed to be so 
closely occupied with it that she had a difficulty 
in raising her eyes to mine. Her color was com 


148 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


siderably heightened. She really looked very 
pretty. 

On the sofa on which my aunt usually reclined 
while her husband pursued his labor of the desk 
sat a young man, a handsome, blonde-haired fel- 
low, with great breadth of shoulder and depth of 
chest — Alec Errol, our local doctor. Like Mary, 
he was intently occupied, and was gazing so earn- 
estly at an illustrated copy of Tennyson’s “ Prin- 
cess,” that he did not look up at first when I 
opened the door. The book being held high I 
saw the lettering on the back, and saw that he 
was holding it upside down. 

Then I caught his eye, and exploded. They 
made a feeble effort at feigning surprise, then 
joined in my laughter ; first Mary, then he. 

I laughed, but it was possibly with some degree 
of excitement and bitterness. Not that I was in 
love with my cousin Mary. I had made love to 
her, it is true, as I have said before, but only in a 
half-serious way, and my passion for her could 
not have been very deep, for no sighs and groans 
had rent my breast when she laughed, as was her 
custom, at my protestations of devotion. Still, I 
may have felt a little bitter at finding her alone 
with Dr. Errol under circumstances that pointed 
to a recognized engagement. 

“ The health of the parish of Garvalt must be 
excellent,” I said, perhaps with something forced 
in my voice, “ when its only doctor can spend his 


PURSUER AND PURSUED. 


149 


afternoons in looking at illustrated books upside 
down.” 

“ Dear me ! ” said Mary readily. What a 
goose you are, Alec.” 

Alec ! She called him by his Christian name. 
It was a little bitter. I remember it did give me 
a certain pang. 

“ Dr. Errol,” Mary contined, with unblushing 
effrontery, “ was giving me some instructions 
about Mamma. She has not been at all well for 
some time. We have been very anxious about 
her.” 

I thought to myself that in this case it was 
rather selfish on the part of the doctor to seek to 
deprive Mrs. Brown of her nurse, but Mary did 
not give me time to make any remark on her 
mother’s illness. 

But what is the matter with you, George ?” 
she ran on. “You look very hot and excited. 
Have you been talking about spooks with Mrs. 
Ingers all this time? It must be a very agitating 
subject. You look as if they had been chasing 
you.” 

I escaped from them to the dining-room. 

Not without bitterness did I recall, at my solitary 
meal, what I had said and thought within the last 
few days about Mary’s straightforward simplicity, 
and frank, fresh, open, unsophisticated disposi- 
tion. She could deceive, too, it seemed. She 
could play a part, innocent country maiden as she 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


150 

was, and concoct her little deceptions as readily 
and speak them as trippingly on the tongue as 
the most practiced woman of the world. 

For the moment I was as bitter against my 
cousin as if she had really given me cause. And 
somehow I began to think more sympathetically 
than I had done for the last few hours of the 
troubles of Mrs. Ingers. In the first flush of my 
joy at shaking off the convict I had been disposed 
to thank my stars that I was rid of the whole 
business. But now I began to reproach myself 
for allowing him to go on to Garacraig alone. 
How was Mrs. Ingers to defend herself against 
him? I shuddered to think of the danger in 
which she stood, with nobody to help her against 
the demands of this strong and unscrupulous 
ruffian. The more I thought of it, the more un- 
easy I became. I felt that I must go at once to 
Garacraig and see what had happened. 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD? 


I5I 

CHAPTER XII. 

WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD? 

My anxiety about Mrs. Ingers, now fully 
awakened, was so keen and disturbing that, once 
I had started to walk to Garacraig, I ceased to 
think of any definite form of danger. I simply 
hurried on, mentally reaching forward, striving to 
annihilate space and time, and arrive on the 
instant at a knowledge of the worst. What the 
worst might be I took no time to think ; my 
whole energy absorbed in getting near it with as 
little delay as possible. P'rom what I had seen 
of Roper’s fits of ferocity, I felt that even her life 
might be in danger if she opposed his demands. 
I reproached myself that, in my selfish joy at hav- 
ing escaped from his company, I had not at once 
thought of the risk run by her. 

I took the shortest way to Garacraig, through 
the fields and the plantation to the back of the 
house, almost running, frequently stumbling over 
the uneven ground, devoured by fear and re- 
morse. I ran in earnest under the cover of the 
trees, and reached the house hot and breathless. 

In order to reach the porch I had to pass the 
window of the parlor at which I had witnessed 


152 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


the meeting between Mrs. Ingers and Roper. I 
turned my eyes towards it involuntarily as I 
passed, half expecting to see the lady again de- 
fending herself against his importunities. 

It was a French window, opening on to the 
lawn. Mrs. Ingers was there, with her right hand 
on the handle of the latch. There was something 
stealthy in her attitude, as if she was trying to un- 
do the fastening with as little noise as possible. 

I was moving rapidly across the soft turf, and 
saw her for a second before she saw me. I was 
right in front of the window when she raised her 
eyes and encountered mine. She started vio- 
lently and paled, her hand pulling the window 
open with a jerk, and then making an involuntary 
movement as if to shut it again. 

A rapid glance showed me that she had a small 
travelling bag in her left hand, and a cloak thrown 
over her arm, and that she wore her hat. I 
stopped abruptly in my rapid walk and stared for 
a second, while my mind was busy with the sig- 
nificance of what I saw — the stealthy attitude, the 
start, the preparation for walking out, or — did she 
meditate a longer flight ? That she had been 
driven from her own house by Roper ; that she 
was trying somehow to evade him, struck me at 
once as obvious. I glanced behind her, and sav. 
that he was not in the room. 

She seemed to be deprived^ of speech for an in- 
stant as much as I was, but presently the blood 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD? 153 

came back to her face, and she addressed me ex- 
citedly in a half-whisper as if gasping for breath 
and fearing to be overheard. 

“ Oh, Mr. Brown, how you startled me !” She 
sat down and held her hand against my side. 

The gesture reminded me of what I knew about 
the weak state of her health some weeks before, 
and filled me with concern. 

It did not occur to me then that she had any 
special reason for being startled at the sight of 
myself. I thought it was simply overstrung 
nerves ; that my appearance had taken her by 
surprise, and that she was in that over-excited 
state in which any surprise produces a sort of 
panic. I did not then know that she had sent an 
intimation to the police before employing me 
as her messenger to the convict. When I did 
know this, I had reason to believe that as I burst 
upon her suddenly, with hot face and flustered 
manner, she may have misconstrued the object of 
my visit, and imagined that I came to reproach 
her. Innocent as I was of any such intention, 
my first words must have reassured her. They 
were apologetic, and endeavored to express some- 
thing of the remorse that I felt at having left her 
to the tender mercies of Roper. 

“ I can never forgive myself, Mrs. Ingers,” I 
said, entering the open window and standing be- 
fore her. “ I can never forgive myself for my 
stupidity in allowing that man to come on here 


154 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


alone. It was worse than stupid ; it was mean 
and cowardly. I am ashamed of myself. I hope 
I am not too late to make some amends. He 
must have frightened you terribly. It pains me 
more than I can express to see you flying like 
this from your own house. Pray give me some- 
thing to do, if there is anything that I can do for 
you.” 

She allowed me to speak like this for some 
little time without answering a word, meeting 
my eyes all the time with a strange expression 
of wonder and incredulity. 

“ Do, do ?” she murmured, in a half-dazed way. 
“ Something to do?” 

^‘Yes,” I answered, “if there is anything you 
can trust me to do after such a delinquency 
Believe me, it was more thoughtlessness than* 
anything else. I did not think of the danger 
to you.” 

She put her right hand to her head, leaned her 
elbow on the arm of the chair into which she had 
thrown herself, and seemed to ponder for a mo- 
ment with half-averted face. Then she started up. 

“ No, no,” she said. “ Go away, and leave me. 
I have no right to take advantage of you. I 
would not have done it before if I had known how 
good you are.” 

“You have taken no advantage of me,” I per- 
sisted. 

She looked at me incredulously. 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD? I55 

“ I don’t understand what you mean,” I said. 

“ You are a good, brave little fellow,” she said, 
rising and speaking in a decisive tone. “ I am 
truly obliged to you for coming here with the 
idea of helping me out of my difficulties. But I 
would rather you had not come. You can do no 
good by remaining here. Let me beg of you 
now to go away. Take my best thanks for your 
good intentions.” 

She held out her hand. I took it reluctantly, 
doubtfully. If she had said no more, I should 
have had no choice but to withdraw, convinced 
though I was that she was in imminent peril, for 
there was something in her manner irresistibly 
suggestive of a genuine desire to be left to herself. 
But while I stood hesitating for a second, awk- 
wardly irresolute between my anxiety to help her 
and doubt whether after all my presence might 
not be a hinderance rather than a help, paralyzed 
by this irresolution, and unable to extricate my- 
self promptly, she added, 

“ I really cannot allow you to sacrifice yourself.” 

If she had stopped short of saying this, I should 
have taken it that it was on her own account that 
she wished me to go away, and this I now believe 
to have been the case. But by these last words 
she seemed to imply that regard for my safety 
was her motive. And fully alive as I was to the 
indelicacy of forcing my services upon her, con- 
sidering the shortness of our acquaintance, I 


156 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


could not retire upon that ground. If I had been 
a man of the world, I dare say I should have 
seen that her professed concern for me was only a 
polite pretence to soften the awkwardness of an 
unceremonious dismissal ; but as it was, I did not 
see this, and felt that to go away thus would look 
as if I were afraid to stay and run any risk for 
myself. 

“ Really, Mrs. Ingers," I stammered, “ I cannot 
leave you at the mercy of this man. Have you 
seen him ? Perhaps you do not know that he is 
about here, somewhere near Garacraig. He told 
me he was coming here to get you to help him 
off.’’ 

“ But,” she said, with a smile, “ I am not at his 
mercy. You see I am just about to fly out of his 
reach.” 

“ At least,” I pleaded, “ let me see you to a 
place of safety. I am certain they would be only 
too glad to .see you at the Manse, if you will go 
there with me.” 

This suggestion seemed greatly to increase her 
impatience. “ No, no,” she said almost angrily, 
still speaking in a low tone, as if fearful of being 
overheard ; “ I am quite able to take care of my- 
self now. Don’t you see that every moment you 
keep me here you increase the danger of his com- 
ing out before I am clear away ?” 

“ He is here, then ?” 

“ Yes, he is in the dining-room, and I am in 


WAS SHI GOOD OR BAD? I57 

terror every moment lest he should come out and 
find me here.” 

“ How stupid I am !” I answered, with a burst 
of officious zeal. “ Let us go at once. Here, let 
me carry that bag for you.” 

Then, when she drew back with a look of alarm 
on her face, which somewhat staggered me, I con- 
tinued to protest apologetically that I really could 
i-fcot let her go alone ; that it was most thoughtless 
on my part to allow the man to make another 
descent upon Garacraig, but that I could not leave 
her now without such protection as it was in my 
power to offer, slight as that might be. 

Even now I cannot recall this scene and my 
own blundering want of tact without a hot sense 
of shame. But how was I to know or to suspect 
that all the time I was obstinately pressing my 
services on Mrs. Ingers Mr. Wood was waiting for 
her in the glen, and that I was exasperating her 
impatience to the point of fury by preventing her 
from joining him ? I never think of the situation 
without registering a vow never again to offer a 
service that I am not asked for. But I was young 
and inexperienced, eager to be of use, and unable 
to see in the circumstances, with such knowledge 
as I had of them, how I could possibly be in the 
way. 

As I continued to insist upon accompanying her, 
she had thrown herself into a chair with a gesture 
of supreme vexation, and at last she spoke in 


158 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


words that the most obstinate officiousness could 
not fail to understand. 

“ Mr. Brown,” she said, “ this is too much. 
You mean well, I have no doubt, but I really 
must insist upon your leaving me to manage my 
own concerns.” 

I was so stupefied by this frank outburst of 
temper that I could find nothing to say. I 
remember muttering something like “ Certainly, 
if you put it in that way ;” and after staring at 
her for a moment in utter confusion, making a 
bolt for the window. The pain that I suffered 
from her rebuff must have been very visible in my 
face, and possibly it was this that made her relent 
and call me back when I already had one foot 
outside the window-sill. 

“You must not think me ungrateful,” she said. 
“ If you are really bent upon running into danger 
on my account there is one way in which you 
might help me.” 

The thrilling sweetness of her voice was irre- 
sistible. My resentment was at once disarmed. 
“Name it,” I said. “ I wish nothing more. If I 
haye erred in being too officious, it has been 
purely in ignorance.” 

“ I understand, I understand,” she murmured. 
“ Forgive my bad temper. If you knew how I 
have been worried you would make allowances 
for me.” 

“ And, remember,” I said, my desire to put my- 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAft 


159 


self right with her returning, “ remember that if 
you had not sent for me first concerning this con- 
vict — ” 

“ Yes, yes,” she interrupted, with a slight return 
of impatience. 

“ What is it that I can do ?” I asked, taking the 
hint of urgency. 

“ About this man, still,” she said, with a depre- 
catory smile. “ He is in there, in the dining-room. 
Would it be too much to ask you to — to — ” 

She seemed to have a difficulty in expressing 
her request. She broke off in the middle of it, 
and added with some little embarrassment, “ I 
must escape alone.” 

“ And you wish me to remain here, and keep a 
watch on him ?” 

“ Not exactly that,” she said, coming nearer to 
me, and speaking in almost caressing tones ; “ but 
if you would be so good — but it is really asking 
too much — if you would be so good as to go in 
there and hold him in conversation for a little. 
But it is asking too much.” 

“ I will do it with pleasure,” I said, with a con- 
fident smile, too much relieved at the prospect of 
escape from an awkward position to be able to 
think seriously of the consequences. I believe 
that at the moment I could have faced any dan- 
ger to avoid the humiliation of simply walking 
away repulsed and leaving the lady to her own 


l6o A GRASS WIDOW. 

devices. Anything better than turning tail in this 
ignominious way. 

“ I will do it with pleasure. But where arc you 
to go in the mean time T' 

“ That is my secret,” she said, with an arch 
smile. I never saw another woman with so many 
changes of expression. “You must not ask me 
that.” If it had been the most trivial affair in the 
world, she could not have spoken in a lighter tone. 
But the next instant she knit her brows, and her 
voice became earnest and even sad. “ Well, per- 
haps it is better after all . _ should tell you. 

What I am going to do is certain to be miscon- 
strued, and it may be as well that I should take 
you into my confidence, that you may contradict 
any malicious rumors. Mr. Wood was here to- 
day.” 

“ I met him on the links.” 

“ So I gathered from what he said. Well, he 
was here when I saw this man hanging about the 
house, and he offered me a refuge on board his 
yacht. It is there that I am going. Do not offer 
again to accompany me. Mr. Wood is waiting 
for me in the glen, and I can easily get safely on 
board if you will kindly hold the man in check for 
less than half an hour.” 

It occurred to me to suggest that she would be 
equally safe at my uncle’s, whence I could drive 
her to the station, if she wished to quit the neigh- 
borhood till it was clear of this pest. That 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD? l6l 

course would be equally safe, and it would not be 
open to misrepresentation as the other might be. 
But she did not give me time to make up my 
mind to offer this suggestion. She had hardly 
told me where she meant to take shelter when 
she hurriedly bade me good-bye, and snatching up 
her cloak and her bag, put her foot on the window- 
sill, leapt out, and ran with light, springy steps 
across the greensward, so shaping her course as to 
keep out of sight of the dining-room windows. 

I watched her ^ih ' disappeared in the glen, 
and wondered then, as I have often wondered 
since, why she did not simply run to her own 
stables and get her servants to drive her to the 
station. I suppose it must have been that she 
seized upon the first way of escape that offered 
itself, and in her excited state was so preoccupied 
with this that she could not think of any other, 
even though it was much simpler and more 
obvious. It turned out to have been as well that 
she took me into her confidence, for I was able 
afterwards to remove her husband’s suspicions. 

In the mean time, however, I turned to fulfil 
my task of keeping the convict in play. One 
thing in her hurry and excitement she had forgot- 
ten to tell me, namely, that since Roper’s descent 
upon Garacraig she had contrived to send for the 
police. I regretted this omission, because it would 
have made my task easier. If I had known that 
the police were at hand I should have contented 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


162 

myself with simply watching to see that Roper 
did not follow upon her track, for I did not much 
relish the idea of facing him alone in the dining- 
room and trying to hold him in talk. However, 
knowing nothing of this arrangement of hers, I 
had no help for it but to carry out my promise 
literally, and beard the lion in his den. I confess 
that it was not without some trepidation that I 
turned the handle of the dining-room door. 

Roper was seated at table with the remains of 
a chicken before him and a bottle of champagne 
at his right hand. He was tearing the flesh off a 
drumstick which he held to his mouth with both 
hands, and had every appearance of enjoying his 
meal. His flushed face and glistening eyes 
showed that the unaccustomed liquor was doing 
its work rapidly, and I saw that the bottle was 
already half-empty. 

I had half expected to see him start when I 
entered ; but no ; he went on eating without show- 
ing the slightest surprise or confusion. 

All well at home, old man ?” were his first 
words, uttered without taking the bone from his 
mouth. “You seemed in a deuce of a hurry to 
get there. Didn’t find the chimney on fire or the 
baby in fits ?” 

Before I could think what to say in answer to 
this pleasantry, he put his bone down on the plate 
with a rattle that almost made me jump, and put- 
ting his right hand on tho neck of the champagne 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD? 


163 


bottle, smacked his lips and asked in the lazy, indif- 
ferent tones of a man full-fed and at peace with 
the world, 

Well, what’s your little game now?” 

I thought it best to humor him. “ I have no 
game in particular, big or little,” I replied, as 
easily and pleasantly as I could, placing a chair 
for myself at the table, some little distance off ; 
“ I have simply come to keep you company. I 
was sorry to have to leave you so abruptly, but I 
had to hurry home to lunch.” 

“ Ah,” he said, “ I like company at meals.” He 
looked amused, and picked his teeth contentedly 
with tongue and forefinger. 

“ Have a weed ?” I suggested, producing a cigar- 
case. 

“ Thanks,” he drawled ; “ but I should like 
some cheese first. Would you mind ringing the 
bell?” 

I did as he asked me, not so much astonished 
at his impudence, of which I had had abundant 
experience before, as puzzled by a certain air of 
purpose in his manner. There was no trace of in- 
ward uneasiness about him, no distrustful or in- 
quiring looks, no bravado. To all appearance 
he was perfectly indifferent to my movements. 
It was as if I had dropped in upon a busy friend 
at his luncheon interval, a man who had done a 
good morning’s work, had a settled programme 
for the afternoon, and cared not a jot for anything 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


164 

or anybody outside the limits of his business. 
Just such an appearance of settled intention was 
manifest in the whole bearing of Mr. Roper. 
What could it be ? What was his little game ? 

I could of course take no step toward finding 
this out while the butler was in the room remov- 
ing the remains of the chicken and putting the 
cheese on the table. During that tunctionary’s 
presence the convict acted up to his conception 
of the heavy swell. The brand of champagne 
had not been fashionable before his incarceration, 
when he might have been better acquainted with 
that liquor ; he did not know the name, asked me 
if I knew, and avowed his preference for “ The 
Widow.” However, he was good enough to ad- 
mit that what he had was not bad stuff, and 
ordered the butler to bring a glass for me. Then 
he talked about shooting, and kept up quite a rat- 
tling fire of questions and comments till the but- 
ler left the room. The only very marked blunder 
he made was to say that he hoped to have a shot 
at a pheasant before he. left, which, seeing that 
we were then in early August, implied a stay of 
some length. I observed the decorous butler steal 
a perplexed look at him when he said this. On 
the topic of shooting pigeons from traps, he evi- 
dently spoke from more familiar knowledge. 

I did my best to encourage him in this discur- 
sive talk. He seemed really to enjoy showing off 
before the butler, who evidently did not know 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD? 165 

what to make of him, though he carried through 
it all the impassive smoothness of a well-trained 
servant. It exactly suited my book, serving ex- 
cellently to pass the time. I calculated that Mrs. 
Ingers must have had a good quarter- of-an-hour’s 
start when, the cheese dispatched and the butler 
safely out of the room, I repeated my offer of a 
cigar. 

This is proper. This is something like,” he 
said, as he settled himself in an easy chair after 
lighting up, having placed another chair within 
reach of his right leg. ‘‘ This I call truly proper.” 

There was still about him the same indescribable 
but palpable air of rest before, business. He had 
the look of a man settled down, but not for the 
day ; of a man merely pausing for an interval of 
thorough enjoyment, with more work still in pros- 
pect, and confident anticipation of going through 
with it prosperously when the time came. 

What were his plans ? I thought I would try 
to draw him out. My mind was now compara- 
tively at ease; he showed no trace of anxiety 
about Mrs. Ingers’s absence, and even if he should 
start up and pursue now, it was only a mile and a 
half to the beach, and she was half-way there by 
this time. 

You have seen Mrs. Ingers, I suppose,” I said. 

“L'>rry? Lord bless you, yes. Do you take 
this for a common pub? How was I to get this 
spread if she hadn’t ordered it up for me?” 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


1 66 

“ And has she agreed to drive you to the 
station?” I asked. 

He took a long pull at the cigar, emitted a 
great puff of smoke, and said coolly, as he watched 
it curling up to the ceiling, “ You’ve hit it. Car- 
riage at five.” He turned lazily round to look at 
the clock on the mantelpiece. “ Wants ten min- 
utes now.” 

So that accounted for his business-like air. It 
was all arranged. Was it a justifiable act to let 
loose such a ruffian on society ? I looked at him 
as he lay stretched at ease, peacefully watching the 
smoke of his cigar. Knowing him to be a jail-bird, 
I could trace evidences of this in his coarse com- 
plexion, his hard, tight-drawn, lean features, his 
rough hands — strangely out of keeping with the 
fashionable cut of Mr. Ingers’s tweed suit. To 
understand rightly the character of a face, you 
should see it in repose as well as in action ; 
and Roper’s face, now in perfect tranquillity, bore 
unmistakable marks of hard and joyless labor — 
of hard labor done under compulsion. As I 
looked at his muscular figure, I could not help 
thinking with a shudder how little chance an 
ordinary man would have against him in a scuffle. 
No ; Mrs. Ingers ought not to have helped him 
to escape. But what could a defenceless woman 
do ? 

I had plenty of leisure to make these reflections, 
for my companion showed no disposition to talk, 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD ? 


167 


but puffed away with every sign of content ; and 
I was wondering whether after all I ought not to 
do something to secure his capture, when he 
startled me by clearing his throat and saying: 

“ Do you happen to know anything about this 
fancy man of Lorry’s ?” 

I do not understand,” I said. 

“ Him that has the yacht out there.” 

No,” I said dryly. 

He began to laugh as at a pleasant reminiscence. 
“It was the rummest start,” he said. “I gave 
them a turn down there in the glen. I came upon 
them spooning there, and got behind a tree. I 
can’t say I liked it, though,” he broke off savagely. 
“ Lorry always did fetch me. Have you known 
her long? Artful, isn’t she, and fetching? Oh, 
deuced fetching.” 

My cheeks burned with indignation. “ Excuse 
me I said, “ I would rather not discuss Mrs. Ingers 
with you under her own roof.” 

“ Quite right, young cock,” he laughed. “You 
should have heard her discussing you with the jolly 
yachtsman. He saw you on the beach last night, 
and was jealous. Lorry always had an knack of 
making her spoons jealous. But she soon smoothed 
him down about you. An awkward sheep ! She 
couldn’t get rid of you. If you and I had not 
been there she would have got off with him last 
night.” 

What was this the scoundrel suggested ? That 


i68 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


Mrs. Ingers had deliberately planned to elope 
with Wood, and was only prevented by my stumb- 
ling against her. The red flag — a signal ? I refused 
to believe it. 

“ You have a lively imagination,” I said to him. 

“ Very,” he asserted ; ‘‘ and a good pair of ears. 
I had quite a little game with them down there. 
I showed myself at a little distance, and then 
stole back to hear what they would say. She 
made him believe that I was Ingers come unex- 
pectedly, and left him waiting there while she 
ran up to weedle the old man and get a few things. 
I dare say it helped to bring him up to the scratch.’’ 
He laughed coarsely, but his laugh passed into a 
kind of growl. ‘T could have throttled the pair 
of them,” he said, with an oath, “ but I thought 
better of it, and only threatened to spoil Lorry’s 
little game unless she drove me to the station.” 

Was all this pure invention, the creation of an 
incorrigible and malicious liar? Could Mrs. In- 
gers have told me so frankly that Mr. Wood was 
waiting for her in the glen if there had been any 
guilty understanding between them? I remem- 
bered this, and remembered also with what trans- 
parent sincerity her eyes had met mine, and re- 
fused to believe her other than honest. I looked 
at her calumniator with disgust. 

And yet, as I looked at him, I was struck with 
a certain pity. Could it have been that he was 
really in love with his cousin? His features 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD? 169 

worked curiously when he boasted of how he had 
turned her secret to his own account. The hand 
holding his cigar dropped to his side, and for a 
moment a wistful look came into his eyes as he 
sat absorbed in thought. 

The sound of carriage-wheels on the gravel out- 
side roused him, and he started up with a very 
different expression of face from that which had 
occupied it a moment before. I had never seen 
such a look of intense and murderous fury. I am 
a fool,’' he growled hoarsely. “ If that carriage had 
not come, a hair would have turned me to board 
that yacht after all, and do for the two of them.” 

The butler entered to announce formally that 
the carriage was ready. He made the announce- 
ment with most obsequious politeness, but there 
was a certain tremor in his voice that made me 
look at him a second time. Roper was so dis- 
composed that he walked out in surly silence with- 
out an attempt of leave-taking, at .which I was 
not sorry. 

But hardly had he gone from the room when 
the butler came in again with a very pale face, 
and ran up to me whispering, “ excuse me, sir. 
Come to the window, here — here. Hush!” and 
he preceded me on tip-toe. “ They are going to 
take him as he enters the carriage.” 

The carriage was drawn up in front of the 
porch. I had hardly time to notice two police- 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


170 

men standing in wait when Roper stepped out 
and they pounced upon him. 

But they were clumsy operators or nervous, and 
the alert and sturdy convict shook them off in 
an instant, and dashing aside the footman who 
held the door for him, sprang into the carriage. 
The policeman rushed forward after him as soon 
as they recovered their footing, but the next in- 
stant a shot was heard, and one of them staggered 
back while the startled horses set off at a gallop. 
The coachman, apparently aware of the plot, had 
been sitting with the reins rather loosely in his 
hands, and was in the act of turning around to 
see the fun when the horses bolted. 

The frightened horses ran a good half-mile down 
the drive before the coachman recovered control 
of them. Thus Roper, who remained in the car- 
riage, had a good start. We had the wounded 
policeman carried into the house, and a man des- 
patched for the doctor, and then we gave chase, 
myself and two other policemen, and several of 
the farm hands. 

We met the carriage returning, and learned from 
the coachman that he had never seen the fugitive, 
being too much occupied with his horses to look 
around till he had brought them to a standstill, 
by which time, doubtless, Roper was out and 
away. 

Bearing in mind how savagely he had spoken of 
Mrs. Ingers and Wood, I directed the pursuit to- 


WAS SHE GOOD OR BAD? 


171 


ward the sea. It seemed to me most likely that 
his first thought would be to try to overtake them 
before they reached the yacht ; if he was tempted 
to attack them before, out of mere jealousy and 
disappointment, he would be doubly so now after 
his cousin had laid such a trap for him. 

But when we came in sight of the sea no trace 
of him was visible. This was not much to be 
wondered at, for though the country was plain 
and treeless, the corn stood high, and what with 
it and stone dykes behind which he might skulk, 
there was abundant shelter for a fugitive of mod- 
erate cunning. The theory of the police was that 
he could not have got far from Garacraig without 
being seen, and that he was hidden somewhere 
among the trees in the glen, which they forthwith 
turned back to search. 

As for myself I was more concerned for the 
safety of Mrs. Ingers than for the capture of the 
convict. The yacht still stood at anchor in the 
bay, a mile or less out from the shore, and I could 
see a boat making for it. Anxious to let them 
know that the plan had miscarried, and that Ro- 
per was still at large and keen for revenge, I ran 
down towards the beach waving my handkerchief 
with all my might. Whether they saw me or not 
I do not know ; but they took not the least notice. 
They weighed anchor as soon as the boat was 
hoisted on board, and stood southwards. But they 
might as well have let the anchor lie, for it was al- 


1/2 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


most a dead calm ; and when, despairing of at- 
tracting their attention, I walked back to see how 
the search was getting on, the yacht was still in 
the bay “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted 
ocean.” 

I learned from one of the policemen the secret 
of the attempt to seize the convict. The idea was 
Wood’s ; it was he at any rate that had gone to 
the police-station, making his way there while 
Mrs. Ingers was up at the house with Roper, so 
that Roper was mistaken in thinking that Wood 
took him for Ingers. The suggestion made by 
Wood was that one of the policemen should get 
up as a footman, and that they should simply 
drive the convict to the prison instead of to the 
station, he knowing little of the country, and con- 
sequently not being able to know in what direc- 
tion he was being driven. It was the unfortunate 
sergeant that had improved, as he thought, upon 
this plan, wishing to have the glory of capturing 
the convict, and thinking that he and his two men 
were equal to the job. The poor man paid for his 
conceit with a bullet wound in the shoulder, which 
kept him off active duty for several weeks. 


’MID THE FURY OF THE STORM. I73 


CHAPTER XIIL 
’mid the fury of the STORM. 

Next morning I was awakened by the rattling 
of the window-frames of my bedroom, and the 
dashing of rain against the panes. I looked out 
and found that a terrible storm from the east was 
raging. 

One of the sights of the neighborhood was the 
sea in an easterly gale. The bay, or bight, on 
which the old church-yard lay, had a sandy beach ; 
but, as I have already said, it was merely a break 
in the rocky coast-line — a smooth interval of not 
more than two or three miles in a very rugged 
shore. On both sides of the bay, north and south, 
were precipitous rocks, with deep water at the 
base, so that with an inshore wind the waves were 
dashed against them with great volume and force. 
Merely from the direction of the wind, I could 
have told that on such a morning as this the coast 
would be a magnificent spectacle for the lover of 
savage grandeur. But I was not left to conject- 
ure ; for when I rose and looked out from the 
bow-shaped dormer, I could see the spray rising 
many feet above the rocks, and forming a sort of 
flying white drapery all along the coast-line north 


174 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


and south of the bay. I did not look long, for 
the rain on the glass made me shiver as if it were 
running down my back. I dressed with all 
speed, eager to be out and to make for the cliffs. 

My eagerness for the spectacle was not, I fear, 
diminished by what I saw upon a more deliberate 
survey of the distant sea before I went down. 
There was a vessel in the offing, some distance 
out, but not far enough out to be safe in such a 
.gale on a leeshore. Why there should be such a 
fascination in the spectacle of human creatures in 
deadly peril, is hard to say; but it is impossible 
to deny that there is such a fascination, however 
little it may be to the credit of those that yield 
to it. 

I made a hurried breakfast, and started out. 
The wind and rain beat in my face with such vio 
lence that I was often fain to call a halt and take 
breath before breasting it again ; and during one 
of those halts, as I neared the village, I became 
aware of a vehicle drawn by two horses tearing 
down the incline behind me. I recognized the 
wagon of the coastguard, and having known one 
or two of the men in my boyhood, I made bold to 
jump on behind, clamber up, reintroduce myself, 
and ask where they were going. 

They were going to succor, if necessary, the 
vessel that I had seen. They came from a coast- 
guard station five miles to the south, and had fol- 
lowed her along the coast, observing the danger 


‘mid the fury of the storm. 175 

of her situation. They had expected that the skip- 
per would try to run her ashore on the sandy beach, 
of Garvalt Bay, there being to their experienced 
eyes very little likelihood that she would be able 
to weather Skateness, her only other chance of 
safety. But either the skipper did not know the 
coast, or he was sanguine of weathering this point, 
for, instead of making for the sandy beach, he had 
persisted in his offshore tack. The vessel had 
passed the bay before the wagon overtook me, and 
had disappeared behind the cliffs to the north ; 
the coastguardsmen were now following her up 
with misgiving. 

I asked if they knew what vessel it was. I 
asked carelessly, not supposing that it had any 
special interest for me beyond any other ship in 
distress. But the answer made my blood run cold. 
It was a yacht that had been seen the night before 
lying becalmed in Garvalt Bay, and that had sailed 
southward when the wind rose. 

The coastguardsmen were driving their horses 
at a rapid pace as men whose presence or absence 
in the nick of time might mean life or death, but 
when I heard this I would fain have quickened 
their speed if it had been possibles. We tore up 
the rising ground from the Garvalt valley to a point 
in the road from which the position of the yacht 
would be visible. 

A glance showed us that her last chance of 
weathering the head was gone. She was not more 


176 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


that half a mile, if so much, from the cliffs ; her 
sails had given way, and she was at the mercy of 
the waves. 

We followed the road at the top of our speed, 
till we reached a point opposite to where the 
doomed yacht lay tossing and lurching and slip- 
ping out on the misty sea, the hull hidden at times 
by the spray that broke over it. The scanty soil 
was cultivated up to the very edge of the rocks, 
and the horses of our jolting wagon were urged 
through a grass field, straining, panting, snorting, 
dripping, right in the teeth of the wind and the 
drifting spray to within thirty yards of the fright- 
ful verge. A dyke of turf separated the plough- 
land from the narrow, irregular margin that was 
left for footpath along the edge of the cliff. Be- 
hind this dyke were congregated the men of a 
little fishing hamlet that lay in a hollow at the 
head of one of the numerous coves with which the 
coast was indented. Not till I came so near did 
I realize the full horror of the situation. The cliffs 
at this point were at least 150 feet high, a jagged, 
precipitous wall rising sheer from deep water; 
but high as they were, the spray from the waves, 
driven against them with appalling violence and 
thundering roar, rose high above them into the 
air, and was caught by the gale and driven in 
drenching showers hundreds of yards inland. I 
peered over the cliff, and in an instant was 
caught full in the face by a gust and a deluge of 


'MID THE FURY OF THE STORM. 1 77 


spray, and driven staggering back. I fell against 
the turf dyke, and one of the fishermen standing 
behind it caught my arm. 

“Stand back a wee,” he shouted in my ear, 
“ and the wind winna touch ye. It hits the face 
of the heuch, and goes clean o'er our heads. 
Look!” And’ he gave a practical illustration of 
what he meant by tearing up a handful of grassy 
turf and tossing it over the edge of the cliff, where 
the wind caught it and whirled it back in a high 
semicircle over our heads. 

I had forgotten this bit of cliff lore in my excite- 
ment. Somehow the comparative calm of this 
oharmed semicircle, in which one stood as if pro- 
tected by an invisible wall, intensified one’s sense 
of the frightful hurly burly of wind and roaring, 
seething water. 

“ There’s little chance of saving them, I fear,” 
I said. 

“ Varry little,” was his answer. “ They are in 
God’s hands.” 

I looked down upon the shouldering crowd of 
huge waves beneath us, racing forward as if in 
furious contest for the first leap at the rocks, and 
over this wild surge to the yacht struggling des- 
perately like a living thing forced in spite of itself 
doom, rearing, slipping, straining to this side and 
to that ; and, as I looked, my teeth began to 
chatter. 

The fisherman was more accustomed to such 


178 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


scenes, but his weather-beaten face had not its 
natural color, and there was a moisture in his 
eyes beyond what the wind had brought into 
them. 

“ They’ve taken to the rigging, you see,” he 
said. “ That shows they’ve given up hope. That’s 
a woman in the shrouds.” 

“ Where ?” I cried, my eyesight blurred by the 
wind and the rain, and thinking of Mrs. Ingers 
1 had tried in vain to distinguish the figure of a 
woman on board. 

There, in the shrouds of the mainmast — lashed 
to them, I suspect. She’s got a man’s coat on 
her, but you can tell her by her hair.” 

Is there no chance ?” 

‘‘Well, that depends upon where she strikes, if 
she ever does strike, for she may founder any 
minute, the sea is so terrible high. If they could 
have run her into the bay now and beached her 
among the sand we might have done something 
for them, but these rocks — if she comes on them, 
they’ll crush her like an egg-shell, and no mortal 
hand can save a soul of them. They shouldn’t 
have tried to weather the head. And yet there’s 
no saying but she might have done it if the sails 
had held, but you see they’re in rags.” 

Three women had been attracted from the ham- 
let by the arrival of the coastguard, and they came 
up to the group on the cliffs with hair dishev- 
elled and clothes flying about them, in a perfect 


'mid the fury of the storm. 179 

frenzy of compassionate terror. Their cries and 
gestures were most unnerving. We all turned to 
them for a minute, while their friends tried to per- 
suade them to go home. 

Suddenly one of them shrieked, “ She’s coming 
on ! She coming on ! Oh, poor things ! poor 
things !” And all three turned and fled back dis- 
tracted with terror and pity to the hamlet. 

Gradually the yacht had been drifting nearer, 
and now a huge v^ave had lifted her up and bore 
her stem on towards the cliff. Several of us ran 
forward, and going down on hands and knees 
peered over the verge to see the last of the 
doomed vessel. It was a terrible moment. I 
fixed my eyes on the figure in the shrouds to 
which the fisherman had directed my attention, 
and as the yacht came on I could distinguish un- 
mistakably the features of Mrs. Ingers. I could 
see her give one look of horror at the rocks, a 
look which I can never remember without a shud- 
der, so ghastly was it in its supreme agony of 
shivering fear. Then she turned her face away. 
Mr. Wood was lashed to the shrouds beside her. 
His face was grave and pale, but he had not lost 
self-control. 

A heavy gust of spray hid them for some sec- 
onds from my view. When it had passed I peered 
down again, expecting to seenothing but fragments 
of wreck. But to my surprise I saw the yacht 
plunging off the shoulder of a huge wave, violent- 


80 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


ly thrown back seawards. Within a few yards of 
the cliff it had been caught by the recoiling water 
and flung back like a shuttlecock. 

At the moment when the shower of spray inter- 
cepted my view, my attention had been caught 
by the frantic gesticulations of a figure in the 
cordage of the foremast. The wildness of his 
gestures had made me look at him, and what I saw 
made me look again as soon as the vessel reap- 
peared with an interest that separated itself 
sharply from the grasp of the terrible scene upon 
my feelings. It was too far off for me, with my 
half-blinded vision, to discern the man’s features, 
but the tonsure of the bare head and the clothes 
that he wore were enough for recognition : it was 
the convict Roper. In horrible contrast to the 
grave demeanor of every other soul on board the 
doomed ship, he seemed from his gestures to be 
raving mad : while he held on to the ropes with 
one hand and one foot, he flung his free limbs 
about in grotesque mirth, and I could see his teeth 
gleaming like the teeth of a snarling dog. From 
the way his head went he seemed to be yelling 
out words with great volubility ; but whatever 
they were, they were lost in the fearful uproar of 
the surge. 

I had no time to speculate as to how he came 
there. The whole horrible scene was so strange 
that I wondered no more at his appearance than 
if it had been in a dream. 


*MID THE FURY OF THE STORM. l8l 

I ran back again to the dyke and the group of 
fishermen and coastguardsmen to see whether the 
temporary respite of the yacht gave any hope of 
escape from ultimate collision. I put the question 
to them, but there was a general shaking of heads. 
Several of them looked to the man who had spoken 
to me before, and who seemed to be considered 
as an authority among them. 

‘‘ She’s near sure to strike next time,” he said. 

Several voices one after another agreed with 
‘‘ Ay, ay,” and one added that it was a near thing 
last time. 

“You see,” resumed the first speaker, “if she’s 
thrown off this heuch by the backwater, she’s sure 
to be caught on the next, over there.” He 
pointed to the cliffs on the other side of the creek 
some two hundred yards off, which jutted farther 
into the sea than the point where we were stand- 
ing. 

“ But surely,” I said, “ if she runs into the 
creek there is some chance.” 

“Ay,” said he, “if she keeps off the Tempen, 
But there’s terrible little chance of her not striking 
the Tempen.” The Tempen was a huge isolated 
peak of rock, nearly as high as the cliff, which 
stood almost in the middle of the narrow, V- 
shaped creek, near the top of it. The sea as it 
raced in ran up the sides of this rock with great 
fury : one shuddered to think of a vessel striking 
there. 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


182 

There was nothing for it but to watch and wait 
the event. 

Again the yacht, after rocking and pitching for 
a minute or two some hundred yards out, was 
borne forward right on the rocks, stem foremost. 
But again, when within a yard or two of destruc- 
tion, it was flung back as before. 

“ The waves are just playing with her like a cat 
with a mouse,'’ said my fisherman. There was no 
levity in this homely comparison ; his pale 
face showed how deeply he felt the horrible posi- 
tion of the poor souls on board, whose agonies 
were thus cruelly protracted. But indeed they 
seemed callous to their fate, too benumbed with 
despair to feel any thrill of hope even from these 
repeated escapes. All but the convict Roper, and 
it seemed as if life or death were a matter of in- 
difference to him, for his mad gesticulations were 
as violent when the yacht came on as when it 
went heaving and rocking back. 

The second escape of the yacht had been seen 
from the hamlet, and the same women who had 
been with us before again came forth, hurrying 
through the wind and rain in frenzied haste, 
stumbling along, blown almost off their feet by 
the fury of the gale. They were like the chorus 
to the tragedy, and no audience was ever more 
piteously thrilled than we were by the wails with 
which they reached us, wails so shrill that they 
pierced even the massive thunders of the storm. 


’Mix. THE FURY OF THE STORM. 183 

“Eh, eh, it’s awfu’ wark this! Peer things, 
peer things, can naething be done.” 

Their condng seemed to make inaction intoler- 
able, helpless as we were to rescue the unhappy 
victims whom the tyrannous sea was torturing to 
death before our eyes. 

One fishermen suggested to the officer of the 
coastguard that he might shoot a line over the 
yacht when it came back, “ just to show the poor 
fellows that we’re thinking of them.” 

This compassionate idea was warmly seconded, 
and the rocket apparatus was quickly removed 
from the wagon and set up, all lending a hand. 
It was wonderful, too, how tongues were unloosed 
by the prospect of doing something, however for- 
lorn the chance of any good coming out of it. 
We had been standing before in cold, shivering 
dread, dumb before the miserable spectacle ; now 
one after another, as we bustled to be in readiness 
for the return of the yacht, gave expression to 
some hope or fear of what might be or regret over 
what might have been. 

“ She may come into the creek yet. She was 
nearer it the second time than the first.” 

“ If we could have got a rope on her from the 
other side we might have warped her in.” 

“Na, na. Steam-power wouldna do it. The 
sea’s o’er strong. 

“But we might warp her off the Tempen, 
though.” 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


184 

Whisht, whisht, here she comes.” 

For the third time the yacht, after hanging for 
a little time uncertainly between the flood and the 
backwater, began to move forward on the cliff. 
On she came swifter and swifter. The coast- 
guardsmen stood ready to fire their rocket, and 
we all waited breathlessly. Presently the loud 
hissing of the fuse blended with the noise of the 
storm, and with a roar off it went as a heavy blast 
of spray came sweeping on us from the cliff. 
When it had passed we dashed forward and 
peered over on hands and knees. 

She had not struck, but was tossing back to sea 
again, rising, plunging, shaking, but still intact. 
But the line that we had shot ! We had not made 
sufficient allowance for the height of the cliffs and 
the wind. The wind had caught it and swung it 
to one side, and the yacht must have passed under 
it. We could see it now depending from the 
cliff a^little to the left of her backward course. 

But had they seen it ? That was almost of 
more consequence ; for we had little hope of being 
able to do anything if we had hit our mark. Yes ; 
the convict had seen it, and doubled his frantic 
laughter ; the others also, and were looking up at 
the cliffs with a new interest in their faces, a look 
of doubtful hope. 

The coastguardsmen prepared for another try, 
and shifted their position a little so that they 
might aim right in the teeth of the wind and over 


’mid the fuky of the storm. 185 

the vessel as she retired, if she should escape be- 
ing dashed on the rocks. 

But this time, as the yacht began to move 
shorewards again, we could see that her direction 
was somewhat changed. She had been carried 
more to the left, and she had not gone more than 
twenty yards when we saw and recognized with 
an almost simultaneous shout that she was head- 
ing for the mouth of the creek. 

Hurriedly the apparatus was replaced, and the 
driver sprang to his post and urged the horses 
towards the head of the creek, while we all rushed 
after the wagon in a body, the wind driving us 
on, stumbling one over another in our frantic 
haste. 

The creek ran inland for a hundred yards. Its 
sides were precipitous, rising to the same height 
as the cliffs on the coast-line, but at the head of 
it the land sloped down to the water, a steep 
slope, but still a comparatively easy descent. If 
the yacht entered the creek and struck on this, 
which was grass-covered three parts down and 
shingle for the rest, there was a chance of saving 
life if the vessel did not go to pieces at once. If 
she struck the Tempen, the isolated rock of which 
I have spoken, all hope was gone. 

She came in as if the ocean monster were tired 
of his cruel sport and had deliberately guided his 
victim, after he was tired of torturing it, straight 
for the place where there was a chance of safety. 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


1 86 

By the time we had reached the head of the 
creek the yacht was well in the mouth of it, safe 
past the cliffs on either side. The sea rushed up 
the slope with such violence with each wave that 
we could not venture far down. The men with 
the rocket chose their ground on a sort of natu- 
ral terrace near the top, and held themselves 
ready to fire as soon as she struck. 

On the yacht came, straight as an arrow, mak- 
ing right for the end of the creek. A moment of 
intense suspense, and she passed the Tempen 
safely. Another moment of wild hope, and borne 
high on a gigantic wave she was shot forward as 
from a catapult, and ploughed shivering into the 
pebbly beach, while the water broke in spray over 
her stern, and the wave that had lifted her in 
came swirling to our feet. At that moment the 
rocket was fired, and went with a roar and a whiz 
over our heads. 

The fate of more than one on board was 
decided in an instant. I had seen the convict, 
just before the ship struck, unloose himself 
from his lashing to the foremast, and run up the 
rigging like a cat, evidently with the hope that if 
the mast fell it would fall forward, and he might 
have a chance of scrambling up the beach. 

It did fall, but sideways. 

This accident proved fatal to the yacht’s crew. 
They were collected in the rigging of the topmast. 


^MID THE FURY OF THE STORM. 1 87 

and when it fell they fell with it into the surge, 
and were borne down with the receding wave. 

But Roper was more fortunate. Exactly how 
it happened I could not clearly see through the 
flying foam and spray, but at the moment when 
the ship struck, he seemed to make a wild leap as 
if to clutch the rocket line, and, missing it, to fall 
within the bulwarks. When next I caught sight 
of his figure, he was holding on to the stump of 
the foremast, and seemed, from his contortions of 
pain, to have been badly hurt. 

Mrs. Ingers and Mr. Wood were also left alive 
on the yacht, which, after a few oscillations, 
heeled over and lay on her starboard side, stuck 
sufficiently fast to keep her place and resist the 
rush of the backwater. They were fastened 
by a rope to the shrouds, and when the vessel 
swung over were brought almost to a horizontal 
position, lying on their faces against the cordage. 
Fortunately the line attached to the rocket had 
fallen on the side of the mast and had slid down 
to them. I saw Mr. Wood grasp it, and begin 
hauling it in with all his might. 

If only the yacht did not slide back there was 
still a chance of saving them. 

But while we bent our attention upon this 
chance, and some of our party began eagerly to 
pull the rope down from the station of the coast- 
guard to pay it out as easily as possible to him, 
suddenly one of the women whom I have already 


i88 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


mentioned, Elspet Lorimer by name, dashed 
down the slope after the retreating wave towards 
the yacht as if determined to rescue the survivors 
single-handed. A cry, half of admiration, half of 
fear, burst from us at this mad act of heroism. 
One of the men, her father, as I afterwards 
learned, shouted to her to come back, but she 
was at the yacht almost before he could articulate 
the words. Seeing that she did not or would not 
hear, he seized the two men next him, one in each 
hand, and indicated by a rapid gesture that we 
should form a chain down the slope. There was 
not an instant’s hesitation in responding to his 
appeal, and in an incredibly short space of time 
we were all standing in line, linked’ hand in hand, 
fired by the woman’s heroism. 

It was a wild impulse on Elspet’s part, a divine 
madness ; but if any human creature could reason- 
ably have counted on succeeding in the feat pro- 
posed, it was this brave fisherwoman. She was a 
woman of splendid physique, head and shoulders 
above the ordinary height of women, and power- 
fully built, with the peculiar erect carriage and 
nimble movement of her class. The women of 
the fishing villages along the coast are inured to 
the hardest work, and have sinews of iron ; they 
do the carrying part of the trade, and they will 
walk and trot miles upon miles with loaded 
‘‘ creels ” on their backs at a pace that would beat 
the strongest man in a hundred yards. Elspet 


*MID THE FURY OF THE STORM. 189 

was an easy champion among these Amazons, 
renowned for her feats of strength and speed. 
When, therefore, she dashed down the slope, I 
felt certain that if any human creature, man or 
woman, could succeed in her daring attempt, 
Elspet would not fail, and I took my stand in the 
line with tears in my eyes and a wild hope in my 
heart that the brave woman would come back 
triumphant. 

And come back triumphant she did. Fortu- 
nately, Mr. Wood kept his nerve and his presence 
of mind ; and when the tall, sure-footed fisher- 
woman came leaping down the slope towards the 
yacht, he at once divined her purpose and quickly 
seconded it. One look at the ebbing tide, and 
he dropped the line at which he was hauling, and 
with a knife that he had fastened sailor-like to his 
waist to be ready for emergencies he cut the ropes 
with which Mrs. Ingers and himself were fastened 
to the cordage, and half-helped, half-lifted her to 
the ship’s side. For an instant the lady hesitated 
to take the leap, and we were in despair for the 
brav'u rescuer as much as for her ; but in another 
instant we saw her drop, and saw her caught in 
the strong arms of Elspet. Elspet caught her as 
lightly as if she had been a package of a few 
pounds, swung the burden on to her back, and 
raced up the steep shingle for her life. Not five 
seconds had she to spare, for as she passed the 
lowermost on our line, and we hurried up after 


190 


A GRASS WIDOW. 


her, the returning wave caught us and swept ns 
off our feet, and if man had not clung loyally to 
man as we sprawled on the slope, some of us 
would have paid for the rescue with our lives. 
But we had breath enough left to cheer when we 
saw Elspet drop her burden safe beyond the 
highest reach of the water. 

Thus was Mrs. Ingers rescued. But Elspet’s 
work was only half done. When she had placed 
the lady on dry ground, she never paused to take 
breath, but set her face again towards the yacht, 
eager for another rescue. 

This, however, was not to be. The returning 
wave had loosened the yacht’s hold upon the 
steep beach, and we turned only to see it sliding 
back into the gulf. 

Something else, too, we saw, more horrible even 
than death by the cruel fury of the sea. As the 
yacht began to slip back, poor Wood seemed to 
conceive the idea of throwing himself over the 
side and taking his chance of scrambling up the 
beach. He would have been wiser to remain on 
board, when we might have rescued him after- 
wards if the timbers had held together. The 
back rush of the water was too strong for any 
man to make way against it. Still, this seemed to 
be his desperate hope, and we saw him clambar 
on to the bulwark as if with the intention of 
dropping over the side. 

But at that moment an arm was thrust up from 


'mid the fury of the storm. 


I9I 


the deck, and grasped him by the waist. Roper 
had been hidden from us after the yacht heeled 
over, but he must have contrived somehow to 
drag himself to where Mr. Wood was standing. 
The moment I saw the arm thrust up, I remem- 
bered the convict’s hatred of his supposed rival, 
and gazed in horrible anticipation of the worst. 

Not all the terrific uproar and confusion of the 
storm could quell the jealous man’s murderous 
passion, and the sea itself was not more relent- 
less. The tragedy passed in an instant. Wood 
had thrown his knife away, but his hand me- 
chanically clutched the empty case at his belt. 
Even if the weapon had been there, he would 
have fared no better. Roper threw himself 
savagely and recklessly forward with all his 
weight and strength, and locking the unfortunate 
gentleman in his arms, fell with him overboard 
into the rushing water. And so they disappeared, 
as we stood horror-struck. I, only, knew the 
motive of the savage deed. 

Mrs. Ingers was conveyed in a fainting con- 
dition, more dead than alive, to Garacraig House, 
and her husband was telegraphed for. The fright 
and exposure that she had undergone resulted in 
a fever, but she had strength enough left to battle 
through it. I left Garvalt before her recovery 
was assured ; but a few weeks afterwards I re- 
ceived a letter from her, and at her request wrote 
at length to her husband to explain certain cir- 
cumstances that had raised his suspicions and 


192 A GRASS WIDOW. 

threatened to disturb their domestic peace. Mr. 
Ingers was good enough in answer to say that 
my explanations were entirely satisfactory, and 
to thank me for them. 

I called upon them afterwards in London, and 
casually learned from Mrs. Ingers how the con- 
vict Roper came to be on board the yacht at the 
time of the shipwreck. He had rowed out co them 
at night as they lay becalmed in Garvalt Bay, 
and had stolen on board, but not, as he believed, 
unobserved. The man on the look-out had seen 
his stealthy approach and given the alarm, and 
Roper had been quietly seized as he climbed over 
the side, and bound. They had released him to 
give him a chance for his life when shipwreck 
seemed to threaten them all. 

Mrs. Ingers is now an active member of more 
than one charitable society. To this day I have 
never quite been able to make up my mind whether 
she was good or bad. 

A short time ago, I attended a wedding. It 
was my cousin Mary’s. Need I say that the 
bridegroom was one Dr. Errol ? 


















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